Anorexia Nervosa Career Proposal

As previously mentioned, adolescents fall short in meeting the full criteria of anorexia nervosa. However, the onset of anorexia nervosa begins during the adolescence. The prevalence of anorexia nervosa during adolescence is what initially inspired me to develop a desire to potentially work with these individuals. Possibly, my ideal choice of career goal would be to a high school counselor working with adolescent patients either fully diagnosed with AN or showing symptoms of AN. An adolescent struggling with body image and weight can stem off to two different categories of eating disorder: anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa. What I found to be interesting is that the differentiating factor between the two categories is the weight of the patient. As a possible high school counselor, I would like to implement and promote healthy eating habits and diet to the students. I would love to also provide a safe environment that is confidential for the adolescent to freely express and openly talk about their struggle with body weight and image. I would also want to be involved with the lunch program of the possible high school I would be working with. It would be detrimental to promote healthy eating habits to …show more content…
The adolescent years encompasses peer relations as a vital and crucial part to the developmental phase. The study that examined the influence of peers on the etiology of AN in adolescences illustrated the detrimental power of peer-relations. Therefore, I would also like to target this area as a high school counselor. Providing relational skills that can help improve the quality of friendships by implementing healthy eating habits would be the goal I would set as a high school counselor. Furthermore, I would incorporate some of the treatment techniques provided by the family-based therapy and utilize it as a tool to combat negative influences from