Foreword by James Lock, M.D.

Associate Professor and Director of the Child and Adolescent Eating Disorder Program at Stanford

Olympia Collins – brilliant, athletic, engaged, informed, beautiful – went from an obsession with food to a fear of food – to what her mother described as “the dissolution of her corporeal being.” Realizing that her daughter was suffering from anorexia nervosa, Laura Collins went in search of answers as to why this was happening and how to stop it.

Eating with Your Anorexic (February, 2005) is a poignant and informative narrative relates how one smart, gutsy, terrified mother rescued her daughter from the “experts” and treated the girl’s life-threatening anorexia using a controversial technique known as the Maudsley Approach. This home-based, family-centered therapy, developed in Great Britain in the 1980s, has been widely used in Europe for many years and is now rapidly gaining acceptance among parents and within the pediatric and child psychiatric communities in the United States.

The Maudsley Approach is based on growing evidence that eating disorders are brain disorders, not an issue of teenage expression or life dysfunction. The Collinses took responsibility for feeding and caring for their ill daughter at home – against the advice of most American eating disorder specialists. During a year of re-feeding their daughter, they were attacked by other parents, left to defend their actions against a hostile treatment community, and rudely fired by their daughter’s therapist (who kept Olympia in treatment for weeks on end, on the assumption that she would eventually reveal that she had been abused by her parents). Their daughter, however, thrived and survived, after home re-feeding.

Beautifully written from the parental point of view, this book is a must-read for parents of anorexic children. It describes clear descriptions of the reality of living with an anorexic, the history and economics of mental illness treatment, the chilling and destructive forces on a family dealing with both illness and an alienating treatment system, and an essential question all parents ask themselves: Why and how can I do better for my children?

Eating with Your Anorexic is:

·The first book that covers the controversial Maudsley Approach to treating anorexia

·A source of practical information and guidance for parents of children with eating disorders

·An eloquent narrative that inspires, empowers, and informs

This book is a furious, sometimes funny book of madness, science, and recovery.

It should give hope to parents –

And pause to those who still cling to outdated ways of thinking about eating disorders.

About the Author:

Laura Collins is a freelance writer whose work has apperaed in a number of magazines, including Parenting, Skirt!, Adoptive Families, Potomac Review, and others. She lives in Virginia.

“You don’t believe me, do you? I know what you’re thinking. “You can’t make an anorexic eat.”

When we rejected – and were rejected by – the traditional and available route of anorexia treatment, we had to fall back on a very authoratarian lifestyle – we say it, you do it. Luckily, we were qualified. Noe one of our parents every tried to be our best friend: they were loving parents, they knew best – or at least had the car keys. This is a very unpopular style of parenting now among our peers, and it wasn’t our habit, but we sure could do it when needed.

Samuel was Ward and I was June and that was that.

Critics of our family’s approach called it “force feeding,” but I call it “supported nutrition.” And remembering the fear that Olympia showed at the beginning of her illness, we operated under the belief that she needed our complete confidence and our absolute authority, to be able to trust us. We promised to feed her, but not overfeed her. Like a girl in the middle of a windstorm, she mostly followed the sound of our voices, trusting, even in her terror, that we would not let her down.” (Pg. 85)

Eating with Your Anorexic

Pub Date: February 2005

ISBN 0-07-144558-7

Hardcover, $19.95

© 2005 HealthNewsDigest.com