Overweight and obesity: focus on group therapy

Overweight, obesity, bulimia, anorexia as well as, eating disorders are particularly difficult to treat. The management should be multiple, combining medical, dietary, psychological and family. In the latter area, group therapy is very interesting. What exactly is this last method?

Food conduct disorders, which include anorexia, overweight, obesity and bulimia, require multidisciplinary treatment: medical, psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, nutritional and family. The symptoms are very diverse, monitoring is necessarily individual. The management protocol typically includes group therapy. What is this method, how do the sessions during group therapy?

What does group therapy?

This group therapy facilitates investment of the person in these therapeutic areas.

The group is a workspace verbal psychotherapy, physical and sensory. The work is psycho-diet, but it is also working on behaviors, eating disorders, and assertiveness, managing and expressing emotions. In the latter route, hypnosis is a help to work on body image and self-image so that the subject appropriates his emotions and feelings.

Past and current problems in relation to family and social group will be repeated in the group and allow to find new resolution channels.

How is group therapy?

Groups are constituted according to the eating disorder anorexia bulimia, overweight obesity.

Before integration to the group, an individual interview is necessary to reassess the indications and facilitate global monitoring.

The number of participants per group is 10 to 15.

Each participant is asked to reformulate its history and his personal position, family, cultural and social.

The first sessions of group therapy are called "semi-open" from the perspective of the commitment participants. by result, the group is "closed", participants and therapists are engaged in a repeated number of sessions in a protocol set in advance. The final sessions are more "soft" so that participants are gradually moving towards the separation of the group.

The protocols are different depending on the time of the sessions (1:30, a day or half a day), rhythm (weekly, biweekly or monthly) and their grouping into modules (one or two modules from 6 to 12 sessions).

Group therapy lasts six months or a year.

Each group is presented and organized by two therapists.

The dynamic is specific to each group, the expression and creativity being preferred.