There are eating disorder-specific skills, and then there are other skills that will differ depending on a person's precise situation.
Just to be clear, somebody who comes in with a BMI of 14 would be attached to our in-patient service for about five or five and a half months, and would then transfer to our day hospital service for two months. Then we'd meet with them individually for four to six months to do follow-up treatment to prevent relapse. Someone like that will have contact with our clinic for nearly a year, during which time they will repeatedly practise, with less and less supervision and containment, skills related to eating normally in a healthy, balanced way, and eventually, if they have anorexia, eating enough to maintain their weight.
Those are the core eating disorder skills that we have to teach people. It takes people about a year's practice to really get those nailed down and generate a robust behavioural recovery.
There is cognitive and psychological recovery as well which takes longer. We have to teach people skills to look at their thinking, cognitive therapy skills to identify streams of thought that are related to the eating disorder, and teach them how to deal with those types of thinking.
Then there is what's eating the person, and that varies wildly from person to person. Some people, as I said, have PTSD. They have to be taught mindfulness skills, affect tolerance skills, and do that work. Some people have other psychiatric comorbidity that has to be treated. That third part is a wide array, a vast array of different things that people might have to learn.