REASONS WHY EATING RECOVERY CENTER IS INFINITELY BETTER THAN THE EMILY PROGRAM

*Let me first preface this by saying that many of you will probably disagree with me, and that’s totally fine (in fact, feel free to share your own opinions as well). For those of you who may have had a bad experience at ERC and a really good one at TEP, that’s also totally fine (and again, I’d love to hear your experiences). These are just some factors that really bother me personally, and make me way more likely to recommend someone to ERC than to TEP (or even anywhere else).*

1. ERC’s partial hospitalization program is a full 11 hours a day, 7 days a week, whereas TEP’s is 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. This means that at ERC, you are supported through all meals (with the exception of HS snack and breakfast on weekends), and you’re prevented from acting on behaviors during that entire time. At TEP, you have giant chunks of the day to act on behaviors, and you’re on your own for at least  2/3rds of meals. It’s so, so painful to see patients who clearly needed a smoother transition down from residential (and are therefore struggling so much) suffer, when there’s a better fit out there for them.

2. At ERC, if you are suspected of acting on behaviors outside of program, they put Sense-wear on you, so your behaviors are still being monitored outside of program. TEP has no such resources.

3. At TEP, if you supplement a meal/snack more than once in a day, they consider sending you to a higher level of care, and worse than that, if you skip a meal and refuse the supplement, they ask you to leave because they’re supposedly unable to treat you if you’re not nourished.  Yet at ERC, if you’re in PHP (I’m not sure how it is in IOP), you’re allowed to supplement as much as you need to, because it proves you’re trying and want to recover. If you refuse the supplement multiple times, they’ll step you up to residential to tube feed you, which is, although unpleasant, nonetheless a means to treat someone who cannot nourish themselves.

4. At ERC, Residential, PHP, and IOP are all entirely separate programs. At TEP, PHP and IOP groups overlap, which means you share groups with people who are at very different stages of recovery than you are. This can be both triggering to people at a lower level of care, and frustrating to those at a higher level.

5. At ERC, they supplement you only for what you didn’t finish. At TEP, you’re supplemented one bulk amount no matter what (so even if you leave just a few bites on the plate, you still have to drink an entire fucking bottle of Boost). This was also the system when I was at Laureate, and it definitely motivated me to complete everything, but it also put a ridiculous amount of pressure on me, and usually resulted in me flat out refusing supplement.

6. At TEP, they encourage you to talk about the food at meals, whereas at ERC and most other treatment centers, they have you save those conversations for your dietitian and therapist.

7. THEY USE THE MOTHER FUCKING MAUDSLEY APPROACH AT TEP AND IT DOES NOT WORK UNLESS YOU’RE A SMALL CHILD. For those of you who have yet experienced Maudsley, you’re lucky. For those of you who have, I am so sorry.

I’m pretty sure that by the end of next week, people are going to start shouting at me “WHY DON’T YOU JUST MARRY ERC IF YOU LOVE IT SO MUCH” and I’ll probably respond with “WELL MAYBE I WILL.”

I just started IOP at TEP and it’s really disconcerting to transition to their philosophies from ERC’s. Like I don’t think TEP is bad (although since it’s only the first day I can’t really make any judgments), but there were many aspects of ERC that I liked a lot more.