Upcoming Webinars

Description:
Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe and deadly illness with significant medical and psychosocial consequences and a mortality rate among the highest of all psychiatric disorders. While many patients with AN recover with treatment, approximately 20-25% experience a chronic form of illness, referred to as severe and enduring AN (SE-AN). Although the classification of SE-AN remains preliminary and controversial, common criteria for SE-AN include lengthy illness duration and history of multiple treatment interventions that have not resulted in sustained recovery.
Existing treatment approaches for AN may not be effective for individuals with a severe, chronic form of the illness. In response, there have increasingly been calls for an alternative approach to the treatment of SE-AN from a chronic illness perspective. Suggested approaches include: widening of treatment goals to include improvement in quality of life and psychosocial functioning, adopting a collaborative stance with less focus on weight restoration, and novel behavioral and pharmacological interventions.
This presentation will focus on innovative approaches to treatment for SE-AN. Dr. Rebecca Boswell, PhD, will share about the process of adapting research on SE-AN to clinical practice at the Princeton Center for Eating Disorders in NJ, USA. She will discuss the components of the PCED program’s SE-AN treatment protocol and will share early clinical outcomes of their SE-AN treatment research initiatives. 

• Rebecca Boswell, PhD

Rebecca Boswell, PhD is the Supervising Psychologist at the Princeton Center for Eating Disorders (PCED), Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center. Dr. Boswell is appointed as Visiting Research Faculty at Princeton University. In her current role, she is leading clinical training and research initiatives at PCED, including the development and implementation of novel treatment approaches for severe and enduring anorexia nervosa. A published researcher and ad-hoc reviewer for more than a dozen journals, she has served in various clinical, research, and supervisory roles at the Yale School of Medicine and the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Boswell earned her PhD and MS in Clinical Psychology at Yale University.