meanwhile over in the real world...

I seem to be on something of a roll with blog posts, even if the two I have in mind for the next couple of days are more re-blogs of other people's words. ICED was exciting from the outside and looks to have been even more from the inside and I'm sure it will continue to spark ideas and blogs in many for some time to come.

However (you just knew there'd be a but) one of the delights of the PC, as opposed to the little screen on my phone from where I connect to the world when I don't have a computer, is that you can fail to engage properly with six different screens at once (in other circles it's called multi-tasking). So while I was whiling away my time reading posts from and about the great and the good (Cynthia Bulik pre-tweeted her own talk, how cool is that?) I was also keeping up with fellow parents on this side of the Atlantic who are trying to get much needed help out of, or even just get some sense out of their local ED services.

I don't think that anyone at ICED stated that there even WAS a perfect system for ED care, let alone that anyone anywhere got it. In fact I know from twitter that one slide specifically mentioned how few people access treatment, how "we are reaching only the minority of individuals with ED".  Whether that is because people don't present for treatment or because when they do there isn't any to hand is a moot point. It IS probably a bit of both, but if the clued up, caring, informed parents Around The Dinner Table can't make services work for them, and more importantly, for their loved ones, it really shows how dire the situation is.

On Thursday we'll have a general election. It may well take a few more weeks to get a new government but from Friday moring onwards I'll be lobbying whoever I can think of to GENUINELY IMPROVE mental health care in general and eating disorders care in particular. It's a long way from Boston US to Boston (or any other town) UK. I expect  it's also a long way from ICED to real on the ground treatment in Massachusetts and if friends want signatures etc to help there I'll oblige, but my number one priority will be to lobby locally and nationally. At present the situation can only be described as dire.

Re-blog

I have re-tweeted the tweets linking to this, but I think it's so good that I shall also re-blog it, copying the most important part (for me) out in full as well - is that re-re-blogging?

Thank you Scienceofeds for this great post http://www.scienceofeds.org/2015/04/30/reflecting-on-the-2015-international-conference-on-eating-disorder/ and in particular for your point;

We can have all the amazing ideas in the world about supportive, collaborative care, but if there is no political economic will to support the real structural changes that need to be in place to bring these to fruition we are left immobilized

A birds eye view of ICED

I have been to Boston, but not this year and for no longer than a day.

I have been to Eating Disorder Conferences but not to ICED and not this year.

So my "attendance" at this conference was virtual and limited - for a couple of hours each day I scoured my twitter feed (a spasmodically accessed place) for posts with the hashtag #ICED2015 and occasionally commented on those I found helpful or worrying.

From this extremely limited view of the conference I understand that it began with great stuff; genetics and exposure therapy, the importance of collaborative working and the necessity to challenge the eating disorder, went on to cite parental expressed emotion as a block to successful treatment and ended with parents being told that they were unwelcome at the table and that many of them didn't want to be there anyway.

For those of you who WERE there, how unhelpful is my view? What did I miss and what did I get completely wrong from listening to the birds?