That's a big question. I guess what I would say is that girls and women with eating disorders are entitled to the same standards of care they would be entitled to if they had any other mental health disorder. There should be guidelines in place. There should be treatment options across all spectrums of treatment, and treatment should be available across this country. That is the minimum standard of care. We have evidence-based research in some areas, and where we don't we need to be doing that research. That's the minimum standard of care, I would say.
I could go into detail about the specific kinds of things we need. Sure we need in-patient programs, and yes, we need residential programs, but a lot of what we need is outpatient programs. We need intensive community programs and people who are trained to work with families where they live and provide them the supports they're entitled to in the way they do for any other mental health disorder.
Our kids often are excluded from those services in general mental health units. If a child had depression, you could send the child to the local outpatient mental health program. When they hear that these kids have eating disorders, we're often told that there's no place for them. In Toronto, all the acute adolescent mental health beds exclude patients who have a primary diagnosis of an eating disorder, even if they have other reasons to be admitted, such as suicidality.
I've had some of my colleagues in psychiatry approach me and tell me that they would want to admit some of these girls, but they're not allowed because girls with eating disorders aren't entitled to those beds.