title: The need for complex ideas in anorexia nervosa: why biology, environment, and psyche all matter, why therapists make mistakes, and why clinical benchmarks are needed for managing weight correction.
abstract: Anorexia nervosa remains an enigma and its clinical challenge is intimidating. But the potential for new insights has been advancing, largely as a result of elegant research in the neurosciences that has modeled behavioral processes resembling key features of the illness. Unfortunately, many in the eating disorder field seem to know little of this work or the implication it holds for treatment philosophy. Instead, the knowledge void has been taken up recently by a host of misguided notions about etiology, blatantly dismissive attitudes toward psychological concepts, and ill-conceived beliefs about therapy priorities. This article is a clinical perspective on these issues.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Semel Institute for Neuroscience, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA. mstrober@mednet.ucla.edu
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Strober
authors.forename: Craig
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D000856:Anorexia Nervosa / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans