I was 42 when my anorexia got so bad I lost more weight than was safe to loose. My pdoc at the time got me into an inpatient treatment center 100+ miles away from home over Thanksgiving & Christmas & through New Years that year. Honestly for me it was useless. I didn't totally understand why but I knew that the psychologist that was working with me had a preconceived notion of what anorexia was caused by & tried to convince me that was what was wrong with me. I had major depression, suicide attempts & honestly at that point I just wanted to die.....it had NOTHING to do with body image but that's all they work with......no underlying issues as to what caused the anorexia in the first place. It was a TOTAL waste of my time. For the next several years, I was in & out of the medical hospital treated with a central line & IV nutrition just to keep me alive which I really didn't want in the first place.

Somehow I managed to get through that & about 9 years later, anorexia hit again. It started with an asthma attack from a forest fire smoke then my Mom was dying of cancer & I went through a trauma with the home care person who abused my mother & threatened me. I had gained too much weight after the first time with anorexia & I lost all but a few pounds of what I had gained. I was put back in the medical hospital & again given IV nutrition. My MD & pdoc wanted me to go inpatient to a treatment center again. This time I understood what had triggered the anorexia. I called around to find out of any ED treatment center would treat anorexia that had been triggered by a trauma & left me with PTSD & the stress of it all had caused the anorexia to kick in again. There wasn't an inpatient treatment center that said that it could handle what was causing me to have the anorexia so I graciously told my MD & Pdoc that there were no qualified centers around that could treat me & explained exactly why. I didn't waste my time going or even trying to go to any of those places that said they couldn't help in the first place. It took 4 years to recover to a safe weight again after all I had gone through.

The thing is for me.....stress triggers the anorexia & then when I start loosing weight, I want to keep loosing weight almost addictively.....but it has nothing to do with body image though I love being thin when I get to the lower weight & be becomes difficult to stop loosing.

There may be some really good treatment facilities, but it depends of what the causes & the triggers of your ED are as to whether you will truly get any help out of them or not.

I find the treatment centers totally lacking because they don't even try to really find the underlying reasons for the problem in the first place. Refeeding doesn't help if you don't get to the bottom of the problem in the first place......it's like sticking your finger in a leak in a dam. Most of the time there is past abuse or past traumas that have brought the person to the place of the ED in the first place & they don't seem to care about even getting you to think or deal with the real issues. You can force a person to refeed but if they go home & back into the same environment......all the refeeding in the world isn't going to help the anorexia or ED.

So that's my experience with my anorexia treatment.

OK, I have since learned on my own that I grew up in a totally dysfunctional home with dysfunctional parents & then married a guy who I have just found out had Asperger's.....33 years of a bad marriage that was nothing but constant fighting. As soon as I left & moved far away from H & got a life of my own, the ED is now under control & I'm neither gaining nor loosing. I am able to sit at a healthy weight. My environment was the contributing factor to my anorexia big time & no one wanted to address those serious issues because they didn't seem serious to them....afterall my H was a NICE person & they seriously weren't capable of dealing with the PTSD I was dealing with after the trauma I went through with the home care person......all the important issues that needed to be dealt with for the ED to come under control.