Online Homework Task 4a Documentary& Text Questions - Abnormal Psych PDF

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Professor Rossi, Abnormal Psych online homework task answers....

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10/27/18 1. What was the Renfrew Center and where is it located? The Renfrew Center is located in Florida. It’s a residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders. 2. What was a typical day like at the Renfrew Center? Each of the women were brought to the nurse to check on their weight daily. The women were fed, and there was staff to make sure they were eating their whole meal. There was therapy talk groups ran by staff, and each women was allowed to express their feelings about themselves or about one another. The women vented about struggling with eating disorders and most of them were very honest about their feelings. Sometimes there was room inspections to make sure no one was breaking the rules such as purging (hiding food or throwing out unfinished food), smoking cigarettes, exercising, hiding pills, etc.

3. Summarize the documentary, describing at least 3 of the people in the THIN video. The film documented the lives of women who were living in a inpatient facility in Florida, called the Renfrew Center. The center housed females with severe eating disorders. The disorders varied between purging, binging, anorexia, and bulimia. The purpose of the documentary was to shows the severity of eating disorders, and how the disorder affects and controls a person’s life. The film documented four women: Shelly Guillory, Pollack Williams, Brittany Robinson, and Alisa Williams. 1. Shelly Guillory is a psychiatric nurse. She has been forced fed through a tube for five years. After ten hospitalizations, Shelly admitted herself into Renfrew. Shelly has been close to committing to suicide. She is known for crushing up pills She weighed 84lbs. According to her mother, Shelly thinks weighing 84lbs “looks good.” Shelly said, she doesn’t want to look any thinner or bigger than her twin sister. She explained, if she became any bigger than her twin sister, it would be “the end of life” for her. The competitive aspect of their relationship is a big factor for Shelly’s eating disorder. According to Shelly, becoming independent scared her, and she felt like she couldn’t control her life on her own. So, having the control of her body and what she puts in into her body makes her feel good. Also, Shelly has an accessible tube that connects to the inside of her stomach. The accessibility of the tube caused her to manipulate what comes out of her stomach. She would flex her core muscles a certain way or use a syringe to suck things out of her stomach, maybe after a binge eating episode. 2. Pollack “Polly” Williams, she admitted herself after a suicide attempt. Polly was always concerned about her weight. She was very strict on diets her whole life. According to Polly, she was counting fat and calories by the time she was eleven years old. Towards the end of the film, she was kicked out of the Renfrew Center for giving Shelly mood stabilizing pills. 3. Brittany Robinson has had an eating disorder since she was eight years old. In one year, she dropped from 185 to 97 pounds. When she arrived at Renfrew, she had a low heart rate, hair loss, and liver damage. At eight years of age, Brittany became a compulsive eater and a “closet eater.” At around twelve years old, Brittany started dieting because of bad body images. She wanted to change her image because she felt different from the other girls at school. She described herself as

always the “big girl” at school, and she wanted to be thinner like her classmates. Her mother noticed Brittany was eating less, so she would force her daughter to eat, but this would lead Brittany to purging the food. The purging started at 15 years of age, and she told her mother after a month about the purging. Unfortunately, her mother didn’t know how to address the situation because she had an eating disorder herself. Together, Brittany and her mother would do this thing called “chew and spit,” where they would put endless amounts of food in their mouths and then spit it out. They thought this was “having a good time.” without realizing it was an issue. 4. Alisa Williams has had an eating disorder for sixteen years. She started dieting at a young age, because her doctor called her fat. She was allowed only 1,000 calories a day, and if she lost a certain amount of weight, she was given a prize as positive reinforcement. Alisa has been hospitalized five times in three months due to her eating disorder. She would continuously binge eat and then purse over a couple of days. Also, Alisa would restrict food. She would have only 200 calories a day. That would include, one single bite chicken, ⅔ of a vegetable, a single egg white. Alisa tried to find satisfaction through school, her children, and marriage, but nothing measured up the desire to be thin. At the end of the film, all of them lost their insurance coverage to stay at the Renfrew Center, because they doing well with their recovery. They all relapsed once they went home. 4. Why was Shelly & Polly's alliance troublesome? Polly was a bad influence on Shelly’s recovery. Shelly was dedicated to her recovery, and although Polly was ahead of her, Polly had a rebellious personality and she would influence Shelly to take mood stabilizer pills, and break the house rules like smoking cigarettes and keeping secrets. 5. Who, if anyone died at the end of the documentary? Polly died at the age of 33, in 2008. Four Questions from the Textbook: 1. Explain why bulimia nervosa and anorexia nervosa are both considered to be characterized by a struggle for control? Anorexia nervosa develops out of a sense of having no control. The person can’t help from following an extreme diet that normally leads to starvation. Someone with Anorexia think being below a normal weight is normal and they’re “proud” of their diet. One feels comforted by the rigid self-control they have over the disorder. Bulimia involves binge eating/compensatory behavior. A key diagnostic feature is a sense of lack of control during a binge. Some individuals experience a binge as a “feeding frenzy,” where they lose all control, eating compulsively and rapidly.

2. How does DSM-5 handle obesity and binge eating disorder?

The DSM-5 includes the new diagnosis, binge-eating disorder. The disorder is defined by binge eating just like bulimia, except without compensatory behavior. In addition, the binges must involve three to five symptoms: rapid eating, feeling uncomfortably full afterward, binge eating when not hungry, feeling uncomfortably full afterward. In contrast to binge-eating disorder, DSM-5 decided that obesity is not a mental disorder, because of how common obesity is in the U.S, 32.2% of adults and 17.1% of children would be considered mentally ill. The DSM-5 tries to distinguish binge-eating disorder from obesity in other ways. The manual says that people with binge-eating disorder are more focused on weight and have more psychological problems than obese individuals. DSM-5 also says that binge eating responds to treatment, while obesity is hard to change. 8. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of bulimia nervosa, you have been asked to design a program based on the successful work of Fairburn, who utilized a variety of cognitive behavioral techniques. Discuss the program you will design I will design a meditation program to improve the recovery of bulimia nervosa. Meditation is grounding, centering, and relaxing. These qualities of meditation can help someone with bulimia lower their anxieties and slow down the purging and and binging episodes. The purpose of meditation is to become aware of your thoughts and emotions. Practicing meditation will help someone with bulimia nervosa notice when their attention shifts into eating disorder thoughts, so then they can eventually control their negative thoughts into something else. The meditation will go on for forty-minutes. I would turn this into a daily activity....