A New HAES™ Friendly Disordered Eating, Exercise and Body Image Screening Tool

Transcript:This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you like what you are reading, please consider subscribing and/or sharing at WeightAndHealthcare.com!Sam Sessamen is someone I’ve had the opportunity to work with multiple times over the last three years and her work is something that I’ve truly appreciated. Recently she told me about a new screening tool that she had created, and I wanted to share it here in case it’s helpful. Here is some background from Sam followed by a link to the screening tool.Tell us a bit about you and your backgroundI’m a therapist in NY that specializes in trauma and Eating Disorders. I am passionate about providing trauma informed and weight neutral care as a result of my own experiences with weight stigma and disordered eating.   What made you decide to create this screening?Many people struggle with disordered eating, body image issues, disordered exercise and the impacts of weight stigma. If you rely solely on standardized diagnostic screening tools and the DSM criteria, you risk missing huge populations that could benefit from working on the above-mentioned issues.Can you share the screening tool development process with us?I wanted this screening to be as comprehensive as possible so anyone struggling in the following areas could be flagged as needing support: Attitude & Thoughts Towards Food, Unhealthy Food Behaviors, Unhealthy Exercise Patterns, Body Image Struggles & Common Medical Complications because of Disordered Eating. The screening questions in each category include DSM criteria, criteria for Orthorexia and reoccurring issues that I see in my own practice that aren’t typically included in a diagnostic tool (e.g. Do you feel like you are waiting to be happy until you can “lose the weight?”).Once I was happy with the questions and format, I put a call out on IG for the assessment to be reviewed. I had 5 HAES-aligned providers, including folks in larger bodies, review the assessment and give me feedback.Were there difficulties and barriers that you faced in putting the tool together?The most difficult part was trying to keep this assessment concise, specifically in the body image and attitudes toward food sections. Since weight stigma and diet culture have catastrophic effects, it would have been easy to continue adding examples of how diet culture and weight stigma show up in folks’ thoughts and behaviors.How do you hope that the tool will be used?First, it’s a screening tool to help mental health professionals identify folks that need help with anything that falls under the disordered eating umbrella. I specifically hope this will circulate to professionals that don’t specialize in Eating Disorders. Many disordered thoughts and behaviors go unflagged by those not trained in Eating Disorders because they are deemed ‘healthy’ by diet culture.Second, I hope it can be a trailhead for professionals and their clients to explore how diet culture and weight stigma impact many areas of clients' lives.You can find the screening tool here! Please note that it was created for individual patient care only and is not a standardized diagnostic tool. Please seek written permission from Samantha Sessamen, LMHC ([email protected]) if you wish to use this in any other context (educational purposes, trainings, etc).Did you find this post helpful? You can subscribe for free to get future posts delivered direct to your inbox, or choose a paid subscription to support the newsletter and get special benefits! Click the Subscribe button below for details:Liked this piece? Share this piece:More research and resources:https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this. Get full access to Weight and Healthcare at weightandhealthcare.substack.com/subscribe