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Welcome to the Norton Center for Eating Disorders and Related Problems!
Our Mission:
Our mission is to provide a warm and safe environment where the individual with an eating disorder, her* family and her friends can get the help they need to establish and/or restore healthy relationships.
In addition to personal relationships, treatment focuses on the relationship she and her loved ones have with food, body image, stress management, family dynamics and conflict resolution.
We approach the problem by aligning with the patient rather than colluding against her, blaming her, or casting her in the role of someone who is incapacitated. In the case of Anorexia, many practitioners frame the problem as a thought disorder, which justifies taking control away from the patient and forcing her into various treatment modalities. While those suffering from an eating disorder do have severe and/or debilitating distortions regarding food, weight and body image, they will ultimately have to choose for themselves whether or not to face their fears and change their relationship with food. Taking away control only delays that decision and may have serious side effects.
*her – we use the feminine because the vast majority of patients with Anorexia, Bulimia and Bulimarexia are female, even though the incidence among males is increasing. We treat males as well as females.
Our Vision:
We want to be seen as the Go To place for those with the most severe cases of Anorexia, Bulimia or Bulimarexia. We believe that our success rates warrant this view. We also want to be known as an alternative to In-Patient treatment.
Who We Are
Dr. J. Renae Norton became interested in the treatment of eating disorders while still in graduate school. Her primary areas of expertise during her doctoral training were family systems theory, and Neuro-psychology. She began her practice in 1985 after doing her residency in clinical psychology at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the years her reputation as the go to therapist for the toughest eating disorder cases has spread to other states and professionals around the country. Presently, she offers the only alternative to inpatient treatment in cases where the individual is suffering from a severe case of Anorexia, Bulimia or a combination of the two (often referred to as Bulimarexia).
Core Beliefs
Dr. Norton did her dissertation in 1985 comparing the identification and treatment of eating disorders from a Gestalt, Behavioral, Psychoanalytic, Neurophysiologic and Family Systems perspective. Her research convinced her that the traditional view of the causes of serious eating disorders, i.e. the overprotective mother along with the critical father, was a gross over- simplification for understanding such disorders. Her belief then and now is that you must treat the individual with an eating disorder taking into consideration all of the various systems that impact her, i.e. the family system, both her family of origin and her current living environment, the current status of her nutritional system, her support systems and emotional coping mechanisms, and at the macro-level, her interpretation of her culture.
“I think one of the reasons I have had so much success treating this population where others have failed, is that I don’t make any assumptions about my patients. I recognize that each person presents with a unique history and with a pattern of behaviors that, though part of a symptom complex, are never exactly the same.”
Another core belief is that traditional treatment approaches are sadly lacking in terms of successful outcomes because they tend to use a One-Size-Fits-All approach for those suffering from an eating disorder. Anorexia and related disorders (such as Bulimarexia) have a higher rate of mortality than any other psychological disorder.
In terms of in-patient care, the high failure rate is partly due to the pressure to reduce costs by limiting the length of stay, but also due to the tendency to use a cookie cutter approach to treatment, which, though less expensive, is also less effective. While the provider may profit more from a standardized approach, the research strongly suggests that it is not more cost-effective for the patient, who often pays an extraordinarily high price for inpatient treatment and usually returns several times, each time getting worse.
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“From my point of view, this is simply unacceptable. We need a method of treatment for this population that is patient-centric, i.e. it needs to be focused on the individual and not the diagnosis. It must also be comprehensive enough to ensure that the gains made in treatment generalize to the patient’s life outside of treatment. Putting an individual in the hospital, who has control issues, and taking away her freedom of choice, only delays the inevitable, i.e. that she herself has to choose a healthy relationship with food in order to live a normal life. Likewise, making the right decision in a treatment facility where there are very few life stressors and minimal opportunities to make the wrong choices, does not prepare the patient for the realities of daily living when she returns home.”
What We Do at the Norton Center for Eating Disorders
Dr. Norton has combined family systems theory and Neuropsychology into a practice specializing in Family Therapy, Eating Disorders of all types, related impulse control disorders such as Binge Drinking and/or Compulsive Spending; and related anxiety disorders such as Social Phobia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. To a much lesser degree, she utilizes her background in Neuropsychology to assess and treat Learning Disabilities, specializing in the identification and treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder.
As it turns out, undetected learning problems are quite prevalent among those suffering from eating disorders. Often the patient with an eating disorder is significantly above average in intelligence, which makes it more difficult to detect such problems. In some cases, an undetected learning disability may have been a precipitating event leading up to the eating disorder as it added to the stress and self-doubt that plagues individuals with these disorders.
What Shaped Us
“As a Family Therapist with a background in systems theory, I came to appreciate the value of treating the entire system. Whenever appropriate, I try to involve the family and/or friends as much as possible. Nine times out of ten, they are desperate to help, but don’t know what to do, which only makes matters worse. Perhaps the most important thing I bring to the therapeutic process is my personal experience with an eating disorder. I believe this gives me a more realistic set of expectations about what is really going on, along with greater appreciation for how brave the patient has to be to overcome this heartbreaking disorder.”