Therapy Fails Patients, Patients Don’t Fail Therapy
Posted by Mark Warren on Fri, Oct 23, 2009 @ 10:14 AM
One of the great tragedies of the mental health system is its labeling of those who have not responded to care as "treatment failures." The truth is the therapy may have failed, but the patient does not. This is obvious in all other areas of health care. When someone has cancer and is given chemotherapy that does not work we do not say they have "failed chemotherapy." Rather, we understand that the chemotherapy was wrong for this patient and their type/progression of cancer. This is also true with eating disorders. If you are not getting better, the problem is not that you are failing therapy; it is that the therapy is wrong for you. This is a central tenant of DBT that “therapy fails patients, patients do not fail therapy”.
One of the complications with treating eating disorders is that the illness itself causes distortions and difficulties with accepting the need for treatment. Effective therapy for eating disorders involves finding the motivation for change and working with your treatment team to make change happen. If you are in therapy for an eating disorder and have not yet found the reasons and motivations you need to get healthy, then it is unlikely that you will get better. Effective therapy therefore begins with developing the motivation to change, the commitment to doing the extraordinarily hard work ahead, and the orientation to what effective care will be for you. For treatment to be successful, these pieces must be in place.
Next week: The relationship between motivation and commitment and eating disorder therapy
Contributions by Sarah Emerman