Living With Food: The Science Supporting Eating Disorder Treatment

By, Dr. Mark Warren

Will I be on medication forever? By the time someone begins a higher level of eating disorder treatment, meaning residential care, in-patient, partial hospitalization, or intensive outpatient, is it fairly common to have taken medication or have medication suggested as part of a treatment plan. This is true despite the fact that medications are not considered to be a primary treatment for eating disorders, except in the use of Prozac for bulimia. Therefore, when medication is used properly, it is often an adjunctive therapy designed to help with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, or overwhelming negative thinking that may accompany an eating disorder or the treatment of an eating disorder. For over 25% of people with an eating disorder, there may be another psychiatric disorder present for which medications are useful. So the answer to the question, “Will I take my medications forever?” is unfortunately “That depends”. It depends if you have another diagnosis, how soon negative thoughts and feelings resolve once in treatment, and how long it takes to feel like you are truly in remission from your illness. 

From a medication perspective people tend to fall in one of three general categories:

1. The client doesn’t like medication and doesn’t ever want to take it. If they have to take it during the acute phase of treatment they will in hopes of stopping as soon as they can. Often there are negative feelings about the use of medications and given that it is not a primary treatment this may be a reasonable position to take. 
2. For a second group almost the opposite happens. The client feels good on medication, and hasn’t felt as relaxed or happy for a long while. Clients in this group will continue to take medication as long as it is tolerable and side effects are not an issue. 
3. The third group of people fall somewhere in-between. There may be a benefit to taking medication, and there may be a concern that once medications are stopped that the benefit will go away. At the same time, there are also feelings present that it will be nice not to have to take medications. There may be a period of time, often years, of seeing what, if any, medications are truly needed, trying to find minimum amounts of medications or perhaps even stopping completely.

So the answer to the question “Will I take medication forever?” is if it’s only for an eating disorder, probably not. If there are other advantages to the medication and the benefits outweigh the risks, you may make that decision.

Should you have any questions or comments concerning this post please email blog@eatingdisorderscleveland.org.

Contributions by Sarah Emerman