The Center for Deployment Psychology at the Uniformed Services University trains military and civilian behavioral health professionals to provide high-quality, culturally sensitive, evidence-based behavioral health services to military personnel, Veterans, and their families.
I was delighted to join Dr. Jenna Ermold and Dr. Kevin Holloway for an episode of their podcast, Practical for Your Practice, to provide information on eating disorder diagnosis and assessment, discuss the impact of the pandemic on their prevalence, and share ongoing efforts by the Columbia Center for Eating Disorders to improve access to training. We talk about how to level the playing field between eating disorder specialists and non-specialist providers and increase the availability of eating disorders education to students across healthcare disciplines, and how a little bit of education can go a long way.
As Drs. Ermold and Holloway explain, providers who are specialists in other areas and those who take a more generalist approach often feel ill-prepared to assess or even ask about eating disorder symptoms. Yet as we have written elsewhere and as the podcast cohosts and I discuss, these disorders can be very disruptive to military readiness, ability to accomplish the mission, and quality of life across many other domains. (For additional “behind the episode” perspective on this, read Dr. Holloway’s main takeaways from our conversation here.)
Read to learn more about our freely available, brief, online training resource, PreparED, and the preliminary evidence we have published showing that the program does appear to improve comfort with and knowledge about these disorders.
[…] and pressure surrounding body size. And, increasing educational efforts on eating disorders amongst military leaders and healthcare providers may allow for increased early detection and intervention, both of which are associated with […]