Recommended Books

With astonishing honesty, this memoir, Get Me Out of Here, reveals what mental illness looks and feels like from the inside, and how healing from borderline personality disorder is possible through intensive therapy and the support of loved ones. A mother, wife, and working professional, Reiland was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at the age of 29--a diagnosis that finally explained her explosive anger, manipulative behaviors, and self-destructive episodes including bouts of anorexia, substance abuse, and promiscuity. A truly riveting read with a hopeful message.

Many books have described victims of rape and battering, but scant attention has been paid to another form of harm increasingly common among women. Here at last is a book that provides help for the thousands of women who secretly inflict violence on themselves. Filled with moving stories, this powerful and compassionate book is the first to focus on women who harm themselves through self-mutilation, compulsive cosmetic surgeries, eating disorders, and other forms of chronic injury to the body.

"Of all the great books written on eating disorders, none has had a wider reach than Life Without Ed. Those suffering have found connection and hope, family members have found understanding and empathy, professionals have learned from it and praised it. It will remain a classic for decades to come."
—Michael E. Berrett, PhD, psychologist; CEO and cofounder of the Center for Change; coauthor of Spiritual Approaches in the Treatment of Women with Eating Disorders

Surviving an Eating Disorder has become a classic since it was first published in 1988. This updated and revised edition provides the latest information on how parents, spouses, friends, and professionals can thoughtfully determine the right course of action in their individual situations. With its combination of information, insight, case examples, and practical strategies, Surviving an Eating Disorder opens the way to new growth and helpful solutions in your relationship with your loved one.

When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy.In this moving and intimate book, Geneen Roth, bestselling author of Feeding the Hungry Heart and Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating, shows how dieting and emotional eating often become a substitute for intimacy. Drawing on her own painful personal experiences, as well as the candid stories of those she has helped in her seminars, Roth examines the crucial issues that surround emotional eating: need for control, dependency on melodrama, desire for what is forbidden, and the belief that one wrong move can mean catastrophe.

"The family-based approach has offered patients a genuine paradigm shift in the treatment of eating disorders, and real hope for recovery from a complex illness. Le Grange and Lock build here on their authoritative manual for the treatment of adolescent anorexia to deliver the first such manual for adolescent bulimia. This book is essential reading for those who seek empirically based, therapeutically sound treatments for children and adolescents with eating disorders."--Leslie A. Sim, PhD, Department of Psychology and Psychiatry, Mayo Clinic

This deeply moving, extraordinarily personal, and--most of all--helpful book chronicles one mother's journey alongside her teenage daughter's recovery from anorexia nervosa. A true story of pain, healing, and discovery, Eating with Your Anorexic is also the first book to introduce the Maudsley approach, the treatment method that restored her daughter's life. This nontraditional but highly effective home-based approach:

• Focuses on enabling parents to refeed their underweight child at home, while they receive therapy as outpatients
• Begins with getting eating and weight normalized before focusing on alleged causes and psychological issues
• Rejects the once-popular theory that parental or familial pathology is at the root of the illness, and utilizes parents as a resource for recovery