Quote from: Vexing on May 13, 2009, 03:59:38 PM
And perhaps the only way to get him to get the help he needs is to tell him some home truths and force him to confront his illness head-on.
Often 'Tough Love' gets results when all the tree hugging in the world turns out to be a big pile of FAIL.
Often these 'Safe' environments are only sheltering, fostering and exacerbating the illness. I don't blame people for not wanting to part of that enabling.
Often people care too much to sit back and do nothing.
Often people care too much to walk away.
My question is this:
Where the f**k are the parents?
I agree with that last remark.
The earlier ones tend to be "accepted wisdom" and not necessarily true on their face.
The problem with the "safe" environments are
not what you seem to imagine.
I've worked around and in Critical Care Units for eating disorders and they do not foster, shelter or exacerbate the illness. In point of fact they tend to be rather strict about food intake and coming clean with their clients. At least the one's who don't die before they get there.
Just as the problem with addictions treatment the problem with CCUs is that insurance coverage has established low length of service as being the primary factor in their ability to make a good profit on their policies.
The patients get great care within the facility and then once they are considered to be "medically safe" (iow, they are not in critical medical care any longer) they are considered to be "cured."
Follow-up and ongoing learning and practicing new ways of living are not reimbursed. For some fairly legitimate reasons (like living on an IV for 2 weeks and having your heart restarted four times while you were there and then being forced to go home and out into the world to "get better" because your insurance will not pay for any further treatment except the normal 7-14 days in a "treatment" program) there is no process available (except to those with very wealthy families or those who are particularly committed to getting better on their own) for the patient to actually find some place that is actually "safe."
It's like saying to the amputee, "well, the stump's stopped bleeding. Off ya go and I really hope you can find a prosthetic and learn how to use it and get around like all the rest of us."
Learned behavior and deeply-seated obsessions take time and practice to get over and the brain takes time to adjust itself to a new way of seeing things. And the CCUs have no mandate to do those things thanks to "managed care" since they don't operate "for free."
Lots of patients are allowed a few extra days 2-4 on grace often enough and the CCU eats that cost.
One of my very best friends (now 27) has been through numerous treatments (from 4-14 days) to heal from anorexia since she was 14. She has slips and even though she leads a support-group for other anorexics she still has her periods of not eating.
A lot of human problems are not susceptible to "short-term" and blithe presumptions.
Please get some education about how these programs do work and how they work before you decide that they do more harm than good.
Nichole
Oh, btw, if people are going to "get aggravated" with hearing the same things over and over again from those who are actually struggling with an obsession or other deeply-seated behavior they should prolly find ways to take a break from such a person if they are gonna mod anything at all.
Bashing the person and showing "tough love" does not apply in this situation. The good sense of the mod does apply and from what I've read here that was not being used.
It ain't the street here and every mod needs to be aware of that. Most of us never say the things we often think and many of us refuse to take actions that might even be seen as "favoritism" or "overly harsh."
The transcript Susan posted showed what happens when the mod either refuses or ignores how to maintain her own safety. That is simply unconscienable and the punishment was definitely warranted.
If staff is gonna "argue" with someone then we need to have some grasp of who we are "arguing" with and an even better grasp of what the guidelines are on this site.
