Eating disorder recovery is differently understood in multi-disciplinary healthcare contexts. In this study, we sought to better understand how healthcare providers (HCPs) describe recovery and communicating about recovery. We conducted an anonymous, online, qualitative survey with 41 eating disorder HCPs. In their responses, HCPs noted that communicating about recovery was core to their practice of establishing collaboration and communication with clients, as well as enabling “realistic hope” in clinical encounters. Recovery was described as related to the concept of attaining “normalcy” in life. We identified several tensions across HCP accounts, including what “normalcy” might look like, differences in the role of diagnostic and other contextual factors in determining recovery and different perspectives on how symptom remission figures in recovery. Our findings suggest that attending to differences in communication about recovery is an important direction for eating disorders research and treatment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.