(New York Times) – Naomi’s therapist had printed out an article for her to read. It was called “Medical Futility and Psychiatry: Palliative Care and Hospice Care as a Last Resort in the Treatment of Refractory Anorexia Nervosa,” published in 2010 in The International Journal of Eating Disorders. The paper’s authors argued that psychiatry needed its own subfield of palliative care: specifically for the 15 to 20 percent of patients whose anorexia developed a “chronic course” and did not respond to standard treatment — and for the fraction of those patients who did not want to keep trying to get better.

These patients, the paper proposed, should not be coerced into treatment but offered an approach that aimed to palliate their psychological pain — until, maybe, they died of their eating disorders. (Read More)