Recovery Puzzle Pieces
Happy Social Work Month to everyone that celebrates! In celebrating this month, I want to highlight an important connection that is often overlooked between social workers and eating disorder treatment. I often see eating disorder treatment as a puzzle and often wonder how social workers can help a person put their ‘recovery puzzle’ back together.
Being a fresh, new MSW graduate, I have been intrigued and invigorated to get my career off and running. But, as I have developed as an eating disorder therapist, I have recognized the lack of education and awareness there is in formal social work education. And this baffles me, because as social workers, one of the first things we are taught is to view a person in their environment. Social workers view people holistically, from a systems perspective and can consider how cultural factors, family dynamics, socioeconomic status, and other social influences contribute to their current struggles – including those of disordered eating. Social workers look through a biopsychosocial lens. Similarly, eating disorders are considered biopsychosocial illnesses – having contributing factors from many different contexts. This is the first and major reason I see social workers as the missing piece of the eating disorder recovery puzzle.
In eating disorder recovery, if someone requires a higher level of care, they often go to residential treatment – where they stay in a facility for several weeks to months, based on the severity of their illness. They see a variety of different specialties such as a medical doctor, registered dietitian, therapist, psychiatrist, etc. If the patient is younger, it is also important to involve the family in treatment. As social workers, utilizing the systems approach, I feel that social workers can bring together all these specialties after patients are discharged to create better outcomes for patients coming out of residential treatment. Often, people feel as though they are in a ‘bubble’ during residential treatment and when they are thrust out into the real world, it is often a shock to the system, and easy to go back to old habits and negative coping skills. Social workers can utilize that biopsychosocial lens to help coordinate services and include the family and other supports in the patient’s recovery. Another puzzle piece to eating disorder recovery put into place.
Another important piece to the eating disorder recovery puzzle is a person finding their voice, independence, and self-advocacy. Diet culture is one of the most prominent contributing factors to eating disorders and let’s face it, we are always going to be surrounded by it. Social workers utilize a strengths perspective in working with a patient – making sure that they not only are working on improving their nutrition and other aspects of their lives, but also their self-esteem, confidence, and self-worth. People recovering from an eating disorder need these to stay on the path of recovery. Social workers can help clients prepare for those situations they will find themselves in and rehearse ways to advocate for themselves. Social workers can teach them how to utilize their unique strengths to contribute to their community to create a sense of purpose and belonging. I believe this is another piece of the puzzle to eating disorder recovery.
While we are studying for our social work degrees, we have a lot of things we need to learn and I believe one of those things needs to be eating disorders, identifying them, and learning how to treat them. I am a big advocate for research and education, and one day hope to be able to officially study these connections and find a way to implement these important topics into every social work education program. And even create a specialized credential for social workers working in eating disorder treatment.
By Natalie Altizer, LSW
