eating disorder

Objective: Recovery from an eating disorder (ED) may be defined differently by different stakeholders. We set out to understand the definition of ED recovery from the perspective of patients, their parents, and clinicians.

Background: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic and posed serious challenges in many countries. A number of studies before the COVID-19 pandemic have shown that the primary caregivers of the ED patients are subjected to great burden, psychological pressure, and serious emotional problems. This study aimed to investigate the psychological distress level of the primary caregivers of ED offspring during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on help-seeking behaviors among individuals with eating disorders and caregivers. We analyzed service utilization data from the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (NEDIC). We compared the number of contacts and symptom frequency between the pandemic period and previous years. NEDIC was contacted 609 times during March 1–April 30, 2020 (72.1% individuals affected by disordered eating, 20.4% caregivers). The number of total contacts significantly increased from 2018 to 2019 and 2018 to 2020 (X2(3) = 50.34, p <.001).

We focused on carers of subjects suffering from eating disorders (ED), and studied the characteristics that mostly expose them to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression and expressed emotion, favoring the accommodation of the family system to the cared person. We administered the accommodation and enabling scale for eating disorders (AESED) questionnaire, the family questionnaire (FQ) and the depression, anxiety and stress scale (DASS-21) questionnaire to 97 carers of 62 ED patients, and investigated the carer's characteristics associated with the scores in the three questionnaires.

Carers of individuals with eating disorders (EDs) report high levels of burden and distress and describe a number of unmet needs. As a result, a number of interventions have been designed to support carers, including the “Maudsley eating disorder collaborative care skills workshops,” which comprise six 2‐hr workshops delivered over 3 months for parents and carers of people with EDs. The current study aimed to test a proof‐of‐concept that this workshop could be effectively delivered in 1 day. An additional aim was to assess whether the workshop had direct effects on carer skills.