Young people with all body shapes and weights can have eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex psychological conditions characterised by harmful attitudes and behaviours, such as restrictive eating, binge eating, and body dissatisfaction. Disordered eating behaviours can happen regardless of a person’s weight or what their body looks like.
While eating disorders are complex conditions, they are treatable. With the right support, young people can recover and enjoy a healthy, fulfilling future. Treatment providers who have experience working with autistic people can adapt therapy sessions and other approaches to ensure that treatment is comfortable and welcoming for each individual.
As with other parts of the Arab world, eating disorders have increased in Saudi Arabia in recent years. The prevalence of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours is now worryingly high, with studies showing that around 7% of Saudi adolescents and young adults have an eating disorder.
Children learn a lot from their parents through observing, analysing, and adopting their behaviours. This includes eating attitudes and behaviours, whether they are positive or
Understanding the feelings and thoughts that underpin a young person’s disordered eating behaviours is a fundamental part of treatment. This blog offers some information on eating disorders, as self-harming behaviour, co-occurring eating disorders and NSSI, and what it means for young people’s treatment and recovery.
Understanding the connection between childhood trauma and eating disorders helps to identify young people who are most at risk. It can also play a key role in the treatment and recovery process, addressing the underlying causes of thought patterns and behaviours that perpetuate eating disorders.
Adolescent athletes are at a higher risk of eating disorders than other young people, particuarly in sports like swimming, combat sports, and gymnastics. As with every young person, eating disorders among athletes are serious mental health conditions that affect their mental and physical health and quality of life.
Eating disorders are serious mental health conditions that usually develop during adolescence. They are complex disorders that have a pervasive effect on a young person’s life, affecting their mental and physical health, relationships with friends and family, emotional and social development, and performance at school.
If your child has an eating disorder, it’s normal to feel worried and concerned. Eating disorders are serious mental health conditions that can harm a young person’s mental and physical health, relationships, and social life. But they are also treatable and, with the right support, young people can recover and reclaim a healthy life.
There are several different evidence-based treatment approaches for eating disorders. Some approaches focus on changing eating habits within a family setting, while others emphasise the way that thinking patterns and behaviours interact to maintain eating disorders. Eating disorder treatment can also involve different levels of care. These include inpatient treatment (also known as residential treatment) and outpatient treatment.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental health disorder that affects the way a young person sees themselves and interacts with the world around them. Young people with BPD often have an unstable or incoherent sense of self, patterns of unstable relationships, and intense emotional reactions. They may experience chronic feelings of emptiness and a fear of abandonment by others.
Dissociative experiences often happen when someone is exposed to a traumatic event. When someone experiences trauma, they may be overwhelmed by stress and detach, in some way, from their experience, emotions, and/or body. People who have experienced acute trauma often describe dissociating from their bodies and watching something happen to themselves.
Despite the mental health epidemic among adolescents and young adults, only a minority access treatment. Barriers to treatment are often institutional: in many places, specialist services do not exist, or spaces are lacking with long waiting lists. But many young people don’t seek help for mental health problems in the first place. Studies suggest that only 18-34% of young people with mental health disorders try to access professional support.
