Clinician Avoidance: Understanding, Identifying, and Responding to Eating Disorder Clinicians' Fear and Anxiety

This workshop will provide an overview of clinician avoidance, i.e., avoiding clinical techniques due to concerns that they are unworkable, intolerable, or harmful, despite existing evidence to the contrary. It will utilize discussion, video role-play review, and provision of practical steps to teach attendees how to recognize and address their own avoidance in clinical work. The “research-practice gap” in the eating disorders field is well-established, with many professionals lamenting the disjunction and dichotomization between research and clinical endeavors. One element of this “gap” that merits further exploration is professionals’ avoidance of evidence-based practices due to some degree of aversion/anxiety about these methods (e.g., omission of effective elements of treatment such as behavioral experiments due to fear of upsetting patients or causing harm). This workshop will incorporate brief presentations on clinician avoidance, with speakers providing practical take-away messages for attendees to explore the role of avoidance in their own work. Dr. von Ranson will present on the reasons clinicians endorse for not using evidence-based practices while recognizing and validating various factors that influence clinical decision-making (15 minutes). Dr. Farrell will examine clinicians’ avoidance of specific intervention methods (e.g., exposure therapy, in-session weighing) and highlight ways to enhance training by addressing clinicians’ concerns (15 minutes). Dr. Waller will discuss how clinicians’ thoughts, emotions, and behaviors maintain avoidance of evidence-based practices and how clinicians may identify and respond adaptively to their own safety/avoidance behaviors (15 minutes). Next, “start-and-stop” video role-play of clinical interactions will be reviewed to facilitate discussion between the speakers and attendees to better understand how clinician avoidance may present (25 minutes). Finally, the speakers will field audience questions and emphasize concrete steps to identify and tolerate clinician fear/anxiety while overcoming avoidance in clinical practice (20 minutes).

This course is based on the video, Clinician Avoidance: Understanding, Identifying, and Responding to Eating Disorder Clinicians' Fear and Anxiety created by Kelsey E Clark, BA et al in 2020.