Cognitive behvioral psychotherapy of a severe anorexia nervosa case

Abstract

Anorexia Nervosa is a chronic, severe psychiatric illness characterized with life threatening weight loss. Patients with eating disorder almost devote their lives to lose weight. In the course of disorder, patients hold irrational fears of becoming overweight and are committed to lose weight with/without engaging bulimic behaviors. The effectiveness of drug treatment and psychotherapy is scant. Therefore, in this paper, treatment process of a 28 y.o patient with anorexia nervosa whom hospitalized to inpatient unit with 33kg is presented to discuss the effectiveness CBT treatment. After two weeks of intense psychiatric care, 10 sessions of CBT is delivered in inpatient unit resulting with significant improvements in her weight control behavior. She completed 6-week inpatient treatment and followed by this, she completed her treatment process as an outpatient client. By the end of treatment, she reached 50kg and sustained her weight afterwards. The records revealed that she manages to cope with her fears of gaining weights and stopped using safety behaviors. Moreover, it is reported that her maintaining behaviors like excessive exercising habits, purging and restrictive dieting abated. Exposure intervention is combined with CBT treatment introduced to help her to first accommodate an imaginary acceptance to idea of gaining weight and tolerating to reach her healthy targeted weight. This followed by using exposure interventions as a preventative instrument to help her overcome her fears of gaining weights, during the 6 months followup she maintained the healthy weight.