The Anna Westin Act of 2015 is the first eating disorder legislation to receive bipartisan support at introduction in the past decade. However, further support is needed for the Anna Westin Act to become a law. Find out how Veritas Collaborative, an eating disorder treatment center in NC, is not only passionate about “Anna’s Law” but is also reaching out for others to join the support. Find out how you can show your support and learn more about The Anna Westin Act at http://veritascollaborative.com/blog/2015/07/a-call-to-action.

1. A Call To Action:
The Anna Westin Act

2. Eating disorder advocates around the nation are more
energized now than ever before because The Anna
Westin Act of 2015 is the first eating disorders
legislation to receive bipartisan support at
introduction in the past decade.
“Anna’s Law,” named in memory of 21-year-old Anna
Westin from Minnesota, was introduced by United States
Congressman Ted Deutch and Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen during the Eating Disorders Coalition
National Lobby Day, May 13th 2015, at a congressional
staff briefing.

3. We’re pleased to say that “Anna’s Law” is steadily gaining
support nationwide thanks to the collaboration of local,
regional, and national eating disorders advocates.
To ensure that the Anna Westin Act becomes law,
we need your help. Join us in this effort.
Write a letter to your Representative — because people
can and do recover from eating disorders when given
access to the care they so desperately need.

4. At the congressional briefing in
May, Chase Bannister, alongside
Johanna Kandel, Dr. Edward
Tyson, Brittany Viola Gonzalez,
and Kitty Westin, addressed
eating disorders treatment and
discussed why “Anna’s Law”
would not only help reduce
barriers to treatment, but also
ensure that physicians, other
health professionals, schools,
and the public receive training to
identify eating disorders and
help people get access to eating
disorders care.

5. We’d like to share some of Chase’s words spoken on Capitol
Hill that day, with the hope that you will join us in this truly
important fight against eating disorders.

6. “Distinguished colleagues, advocates, policy makers,
members of the press, and other gathered agents of
the public trust,
I confess myself humbled to be at this table. I am
moved by the vulnerable and sacred narratives you
each share with us today through unique, beautifully-
painful stories of loss, love, and life. The words of
researcher and academician Dr. Brene Brown,
perhaps, have never been more ontologically earnest:
“Vulnerability is our most accurate
measurement of courage.”

7. Kitty and Brittany — and those of you seated before us
— you are each embodiments of that courage, in purest
form.
As I set about my charge this day to highlight the
import of eating disorders treatment, to illustrate the
indispensable nature of providing this treatment at the
right times and at the requisite levels of care long-
recognized by the medical and psychiatric
communities — I pray I might borrow but a portion of
your courage in speaking forthrightly about eating
disorders treatment and the life-saving notion that
following best-practices saves lives.

8. Whether it be in my historical roles as an outpatient
provider or as clinical director of a residential eating
disorder facility, or in my present capacity as a
Founder of Veritas Collaborative, a specialty hospital
for the treatment of eating disorders, I’ve invested the
greater portion of my professional life in service of a
single teleological errand —
to advance the public’s access to best-practice care for
those suffering with eating disorders, the most lethal of
all psychiatric illnesses.

9. Eating disorders are notoriously difficult to identify.
Insidious within increasingly-competitive academic
and corporate milieus, eating disorders mask as a
culturally-heralded ‘disciplined will’ rather than the
devastating mental illnesses they are, cruelly chipping
away at the most basic elements of common life — of
bodies, minds, hopes, & relationships.
Adding insult to injury, onset of eating disorders often
occurs during adolescence — that vital juncture
wherein bodies, minds, hopes, & relationships are
meant to spark and to thrive.

10. Perhaps due to the complexities of illness presentation
and the tragic dearth of comprehensive training, too few
clinicians elect to labor in this vineyard. Yet it is precisely
here — at the intersection of ‘desperate need’ and
‘limited tools’ — that expert providers are needed most.
As evidenced by the literature, these complex disorders
require a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach,
including the participation of physicians, psychiatrists,
psychotherapists, nurses and dieticians, alongside a
consistent, steady dose of family involvement.

11. I highlight the import of families in treatment because I’m
emboldened to say that eating disorder treatment
without family involvement is incomplete treatment. For
far too long, we disenfranchised the very people poised to
be the primary interlocutors of care over the long-haul.
Research showed us where we erred, and practice-ethics
righted our course.
We’ve learned a great deal about best-practice care as
eating disorders emerge from locations of shame and
shadow. Where treatment was once a scattershot
amalgam of ‘eclectic’ approaches, a body of empirical
evidence lends credence to a new standard of care.

12. For instance, we now know that persons with eating
disorders are best served along a continuum-of-care,
transitioning between greater or lesser intensities of care
as particular clinical circumstances require.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Practice
Guideline for the Treatment of Patients with Eating
Disorders, now in its 3rd edition, delineates this
continuum — a blueprint of sorts designed to meet the
treatment needs of patients and families at specific
markers of severity.

13. Outpatient care, intensive outpatient, partial
hospitalization, residential treatment, and inpatient care
– words many of us have encountered in various spheres
– are key to any initiative seeking to alter the eating
disorders landscape for the better.
Unfortunately, access to specialty services at any of these
levels of care is remarkably limited, even as we know that
eating disorders carry a potent mortality risk more than
12 times that of their peers, claiming a life in this country
every 62 minutes.

14. Recent expansion and revision of formal eating disorders
diagnoses has increased our estimates of the number of
Americans with eating disorders to as many as 24 million,
more than double the previous figure.
The many advancements we’ve made in the
understanding and treatment of eating disorders are still
dwarfed by the enormity of the problem. For clinicians,
the sheer magnitude of these numbers galvanizes us to
speak up, for we know eating disorders are neither easy
to diagnose nor simple to treat.

15. Plainly spoken, our citizenry is in need, and the status
quo is unacceptable, if not unconscionable.
For interestingly, despite the final regulations of the
Mental Health Parity and Addictions Equity Act —
specifically highlighting Residential Care as vital part of
healthcare service delivery —
increasing restrictions to health insurance benefits and
coverage remain a major obstacle for many
families…families simply seeking adequate care for the
loved ones they’re charged to protect.

16. Whereas for years the treatment community has
collectively honored the APA Guidelines as the baseline
protocol for discerning the appropriate medical and
psychiatric placements for patients along the treatment
continuum, we find many insurers use their own, far
more constrained, and sometimes self-created criteria to
adjudicate who deserves care and who does not.
Families often feel forced to choose between trusting
their clinical providers or acquiescing to the opinion of a
reviewer, who knows their loved one on paper alone.
Artificially abbreviated treatment and opaque discharge
criteria are common ingredients to relapse, as well as
emotional toil and financial burden.

17. Due to inherent complexities at the intersection of mental
& physical health, severe eating disorders can be costly to
treat. Yet relative to other accepted medical interventions,
the treatment of eating disorders using best practices is
actually demonstrably more economical.
While seemingly counter-intuitive, data analyses show
the costs of inadequate treatment for eating disorders
(prolonged medical expenses from readmission after
readmission, and related sequelæ of further health
system interventions) far exceed the cost of treating to
positive outcome.

18. Were we simply to follow the APA guidelines (those
evidence-based golden standards of care), we could
thwart the revolving door of care and relieve substantial
burden on the healthcare system as a whole. Short-term
thinking about cost-containment for adequate eating
disorders treatment, one might say, has no benefit at all.
More than two thousand years ago, Hippocrates held
forth on this very matter, saying,
“Let medicine be thy food and let food
be thy medicine.”

19. Eating disorder treatment exists because — time and
time again — we’ve seen how the responsible provision
of care restores hope and returns light to the lives of
wonderful, remarkable people — and this world stands in
need of their uniquely creative voices.
This we believe.

20. Now more than ever, we hold fast to the claim that the
vital enterprise of re-nourishing bodies and minds is (and
must be) a ‘together’ sort of affair.
We’re all at this table of recovery – family members,
patients, clinicians, referring providers, advocates,
researchers, teachers, universities, policy-makers,
thought-leaders, and friends—and at this table, we
unleash an unspeakably powerful force to aid those
courageous persons doing the profoundly exigent
work of recovery.

21. Our commitment — one with another — could very well
be the inflection point to save untold lives.
So do join us at this table, for you are wanted here — and
we’ve set a place just for you.
Thank you.”