Therapy
Adolescent Treatment
The UTHealth Houston Center for Eating Disorders uses a stepped-care approach to the treatment of adolescents with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Adolescents receiving treatment in our Outpatient Eating Disorders Clinic will almost always be provided with a course of FBT, the gold standard treatment for adolescents with eating disorders. If families and their loved ones are struggling to improve at our outpatient level of care, or simply desire more support, our stepped-care approach to treatment allows us to seamlessly provide patients with the same therapy at higher levels of care, while systematically integrating additional evidence-based treatments that are shown to be effective in addressing their eating concerns. Given the impracticality of parents being able to attend full days of IOP and PHP with their loved ones, our higher level of care programs will continue to support parents in implementing FBT during breakfast at our Center, and while their child is at home and outside of program. Their child will concurrently be provided CBT-E, where they will have the opportunity to work independently on dismantling their eating disorder. CBT-E is a research-supported treatment that targets an individual’s thoughts and behaviors that contribute to their “over-evaluation of body shape and weight”. This tendency for individuals to become preoccupied with their body shape and weight and use their body shape and weight as a major source of self-esteem is often central to the core pathology of eating disorders.
In providing a multi-step, concurrent, family, and individual approach to treatment, we seek to provide our patients with the support they need to overcome their eating disorders within the least restrictive environment possible. When sufficient progress is made in our higher level of care programs, patients and their families are able to step back down to the Outpatient level of care to continue addressing their eating disorder.