A Comparison of Motivation-Oriented Versus Psychoeducation-Oriented Day Hospital Treatment for Eating Disorders

The Adult Eating Disorders Day Hospital Program at NYGH treats patients with a diagnosis of an eating disorder, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and other specified feeding and eating disorder. As with all intensive eating disorder treatment programs, relapse and drop-out are common occurrences. These outcomes are understood to occur when a patient is not ready to commit to the behavioural changes that are required for recovery, including normalized eating and abstinence from extreme food restriction, and bingeing and purging symptoms. Many patients struggle while they are in treatment for an eating disorder, demonstrating continued dietary restriction or urges to have symptoms like bingeing and purging.

The investigators are interested in examining whether modifications to the way in which the NYGH adult eating disorders program addresses motivation among patients will improve the quality, efficiency, and outcome of care. This study will compare two psychosocial adjunctive treatments during the standard hospital-based day treatment: one that focuses on patients' motivation to recover (motivational interviewing; MI) and the other that focuses on teaching patients about eating disorders and their associated risks (psychoeducation).

Informed by previous findings that a brief pre-treatment of MI can sometimes reduce treatment drop-out from intensive ED treatment, the current study aims to understand the effectiveness of motivation-oriented treatment for eating disorders. Based on previous research, if a patient is encouraged to reflect on and resolve obstacles to their readiness to change throughout the course of treatment, the researchers believe that objective treatment outcomes will improve alongside positive shifts in personal agency and confidence in one's ability to get better. Therefore, in addition to examining treatment completion and symptom improvement (as assessed by the standard questionnaires given to patients as part of program evaluation), the researchers will examine other psychological indicators of improvement that previous research has shown are important to consider in recovery, including treatment outcome expectancy (i.e., whether a patient feels confident that they can get better) as well as satisfaction with treatment.

The study will consist of two groups: patients will be randomly assigned to either motivation-oriented treatment or psychoeducation-oriented treatment. The researchers will include the fairly comprehensive package of outcome measures already administered to patients in this program to ensure that the researchers are looking at overall symptomatology in patients, as well as processes that could be expected to mediate outcome, such as patients' treatment outcome expectancies. The researchers will compare means on all measures between groups from pre-, mid- and end-of-treatment. The researchers believe that results from this study will add to the growing body of literature demonstrating the therapeutic benefit for motivation-oriented treatments for eating disorders and could assist the treatment team at NYGH and other hospitals with treatment planning.