South Bay residential treatment center offers support for teens with eating disorders

The Campbell-based Los Gatos Therapy Center opened the South Bay’s first and only residential eating disorder treatment center for teenagers earlier this month after seeing a spike in local cases.

The center, located in San Jose, can accommodate six teens who need extra monitoring and support while they heal from their eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia and binge eating.

Eating disorders “have been an issue for a long time, but I feel like with COVID, it was really a catalyst for a lot of kids and adults to get confronted with what already has been happening with them,” program director Azhar Sultanova said. “That’s when we’ve seen a huge increase in people actually realizing that they need help and asking for that help.”

There have been similar increases nationwide. Emergency department visits for teenage girls dealing with eating disorders doubled nationwide during the pandemic, according to a study published earlier this year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Teen rates of anxiety and depression are on the rise as well.

During lockdown, Sultanova said, it was harder for teens to hide their disorders and parents picked up on missed meals. The pandemic also pushed school online and made it easier for families to accommodate therapy and care.

“Especially for younger people nowadays, social media plays a big part in the proliferation of eating disorders,” said Jared Schriner, outreach coordinator for the Campbell-based Eating Disorders Resource Center. “It’s definitely harmful for young kids seeing all these images of what people see as the ideal body type, like the way that that can affect them.”

Bay Area eating disorder treatment centers were filling fast and unable to take new clients, which inspired LGTC to meet the demand and develop a residential treatment program.

“Initially, our goal is to prevent people from getting to the point where they need to go to residential,” executive director Eugene Tilman said. “Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. We would like to be in control of the treatment for the client.”

Patients with eating disorders can enter outpatient treatment programs, where they see a therapist once a week, or Intensive outpatient, which is typically three to five days a week for three hours at a time.

If they need more support and structure or their vital signs are inconsistent, patients will typically be enrolled in residential treatment centers for round-the-clock care, where they receive medical monitoring, medication, therapy sessions and community building.

Though it’s a serious situation, the patient doesn’t need to be hospitalized. Patients do not attend school while at the treatment center, but instead are homeschooled.