How to Build an Eating Disorder Treatment Center
June 15th, 2009
I had the good fortune to work at another eating disorder treatment program in the early 1990s. I learned a lot about eating disorders, and I saw first hand what I liked and didn’t like about treatment! Later, when I was in private practice, my clients included many young women who were athletes at the University of Arizona. I couldn’t help noticing how many of them went into treatment over the summer only to relapse once they returned to school in the fall.
At that time I was working on my PhD at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco. While studying Clinical Behavioral Medicine, I was introduced to concept of stress-related illness. It didn’t take long to recognize that many illnesses — including eating disorders — were the result of chronic stress. I knew then that an effective eating disorder treatment program would have to offer much more than traditional psychotherapy.
I had wanted to start my own program for some time, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. I had very little money, no angels and no investors. All I had was a gift of $5000 from my mother and a web site called, “ED Recovery Online” that I had started in 1994. I invested in business cards and stationery and rented a small space on the property of Cottonwood, a chemical dependency treatment center in Tucson, Arizona. I maxed out my credit cards buying bedding and art supplies, and we were off!
Mirasol opened its doors on July 1, 1999, and filled up almost immediately. I used pretty much the same interventions that were used in the Stanford Center for Integrative Medicine, including neurofeedback, yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and body therapies.
In a few weeks, we will celebrate our 10th anniversary, and as I look back at the past decade, I believe that Mirasol owes its success to the following elements:
- Love. I live in a world with only two emotions, love and fear. With a firm foundation of love for the people I wanted to help, how could I go wrong?
- Passion. When it comes to starting a treatment center, your work becomes your total focus. Not much else matters. You link every thought, every conversation, every e-mail and every discussion you have to your project. I became the most boring, single-minded person in the world!
- Commitment. Starting a treatment center is not a part-time occupation. Eating disorder treatment programs, centers, clinics — whatever you want to call them — are not built, they are birthed. The gestation period can take well over nine months and there is a very long and painful labor. When you design your program, always do so with the best interests of the patient in mind. Include your most innovative ideas and all of the research you’ve done. If necessary, you can reduce costs later on if you need to make it more affordable.
- Chutzpah (Being Brave and Bold). Navigating the zoning, licensing and marketing will take courage and persistence. You need to overcome your fear when you’ve hired your staff and have no patients! Remember that the only way you can fail is to not try!
- Sensitivity. You need to remain flexible and sensitive to your patients’ needs at all times, and to remember to treat each client as an individual. You need to continually learn from your clients and to improve your program based on testing and measuring your results. You need to keep on striving to offer the best!
Most important is remembering that we live in a world where we can make a contribution. The universe has brought us to this point and has made it our job here on this earth to help these people that suffer so terribly. If you feel the hand of the universe at your back, there’s no way you can miss!
