In The New York Times, October 18th, Roni Caryn Rabin reports on the success of “Bringing in the Family to Fight Anorexia.”

Now a new study by Dr. Le Grange, of the University of Chicago, reports that the family approach, called the Maudsley method after the London hospital where it was developed, not only is more effective than individual therapy but also keeps working even after the treatment ends. The study, published this month in Archives of General Psychiatry, is one of just a handful of clinical trials that have evaluated treatments for anorexia nervosa in adolescents. Researchers randomly assigned 121 patients ages 12 to 18, mostly girls, to a year of either family or individual therapy at the University of Chicago and at Stanford — 24 hours in all.

Impressive results:

Twelve months after the treatment had ended, 49 percent of those who had been in family therapy were in full remission, more than double the 23 percent of those who had been in individual therapy. And among patients who were in remission at the end of the treatment itself, only 10 percent of the family-therapy group had relapsed a year later, compared with 40 percent of those who had individual therapy.

[One] therapist told her that parents should not be the “food police,” and that therapy had to get to the root causes of the problem before her daughter would resume eating.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Ms. Brown said in an interview. “You need the physical recovery first, and then the cognitive recovery. The patient is racked with guilt, anxiety, feeling she’s fat and loathsome if she eats — it was our job to be louder and drown out those voices in her head.”