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Diagnosing Eating Disorders |

Eating disorders are serious, but they are treatable with the proper diagnosis.

Dr. Melissa Spann, Psychotherapist and Executive Director with Oliver-Pyatt Centers, talks about how important it is to be clinically diagnosed correctly if you have an eating disorder.

Transcript


So eating disorders we know are very serious but they are treatable that’s the good news with the proper diagnosis so doctor can you talk to us about the importance to be clinically diagnosed correctly if you have an eating disorder yes so it is really important to have an appropriate diagnosis because only with the appropriate diagnosis can you then do the appropriate treatment so I always recommend to make sure that the person that you’re seeing if it’s a mental health professional or any kind of provider is a certified eating disorder specialist someone who knows what they’re doing in the field of eating disorders alright and we have a graph here that I’d like to show my viewers the CDC breaks down the numbers for us and it looks like the majority of people with eating disorders have a co-occurring condition first tell me what that is sure so a co-occurring condition is something that’s happening in addition to the eating disorder so the way that I explain this is that eating disorders don’t occur within a bubble the majority of people are struggling with another mental health type of issue you can see from this graphic here anorexia bulimia and binge eating disorder down with any disorder there’s a high co-occurrence of struggles in particular with anxiety disorders it’s one of the risk factors to the onset and development of an eating disorder is a pre-existing diagnosis and which condition would you say usually occurs first you know it’s such a great question and what I like to talk with families about is that it really doesn’t help us to chicken-and-egg it we want to say what it doesn’t really matter what came first we need to treat both and we need to treat them aggressively you

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