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Find answers to frequently asked questions about Equip's program, treatment approaches, and how we can support you, your loved one, or your patient. 

Frequently Asked Questions

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We tailor treatment to each patient’s unique needs by using a variety of evidence-based treatment approaches.

Here’s a simple breakdown of the evidence-based approaches we most frequently use:

Family-based treatment (FBT): FBT is based on the idea that family members are best suited to help their loved one recover. Research shows that for children and adolescents with eating disorders, FBT has the highest rates of recovery and the lowest rates of relapse.

Enhanced cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT-E): CBT-E focuses on challenging unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that keep an eating disorder going.

Cognitive behavioral therapy for ARFID (CBT-AR): CBT-AR uses personalized strategies to address patients' unique ARFID symptoms, including sensory sensitivities, food-related fears, and lack of interest or poor appetite.

Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT): DBT provides tools to help people regulate and cope with difficult emotions.

Temperament-based therapy with supports (TBT-S): TBT-S helps patients understand how their temperament traits (e.g. perfectionism, impulsivity, and determination) may contribute to their eating disorder symptoms, and how they can channel these traits into building a life outside of the eating disorder.

Exposure and response prevention (ERP): ERP focuses on helping people face their fears and triggers. These may include specific fear foods or social situations that contribute to eating disorder behaviors.

You can learn more about Equip’s treatment approaches 

There is no waitlist for Equip, so treatment can start on a timeline that works for you. For some patients, medical clearance is needed before treatment can begin. Your admissions specialist will coordinate your start date with you, and review the steps to complete before your first session. Learn more about the admissions process 

While we believe that involvement from supportive people around you can be helpful in recovery, we don’t require family or other supports to be part of the process. You can also start on your own, then work with your team to identify who might be a good support and determine the best way to involve them in treatment.

The key to FBT is caregiver and family involvement throughout the recovery journey. We encourage families to bring anyone who would be important for creating a recovery-supporting environment for the patient. Due to the virtual nature of our treatment, Equip can accommodate any family configuration, whether that means a single-family home, divorced families, chosen family with non-biological loved ones, and anything in between. We provide a level of care and support that’s truly tailored to each family in a way that’s often logistically impossible in brick-and-mortar settings.

We treat patients of all ages and all eating disorder diagnoses in all 50 states. Our providers are trained to treat patients with all types and subtypes of eating disorders in the DSM, including anorexia, ARFID, bulimia, binge eating disorder (BED), and OSFED, and we also treat patients without an official eating disorder diagnosis.

Many of our patients experience comorbidities, and our clinicians are trained in treating these alongside the eating disorder. In fact, the majority of our patients present with one or more comorbid conditions, which are addressed over the course of treatment.

We know that college mental health services are often spread too thin to effectively diagnose and treat the many students struggling with eating disorders. Equip helps fill the gaps in on-campus health services by providing comprehensive virtual treatment that takes patients through every stage of recovery.

When you refer a patient to Equip, we work with you directly to help them transition seamlessly to Equip care. Once treatment starts, we work with referring providers as necessary to provide updates on treatment progress and collaborate on any in-person treatment needs.

As long as patients are medically stable, we can begin treatment. For patients who are medically vulnerable, we require an in-person medical clearance exam before beginning treatment at Equip. This typically involves a visit to their primary care provider for a physical exam and to check weight, height, orthostatic vitals, and/or labs.

After they are medically cleared (using the criteria from the 

American Psychiatric Association Practice

Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine

), we continue to monitor medical status during their time at Equip, either through virtual medical monitoring or by collaborating with in-person medical providers, depending on a patient's needs. By closely tracking weight, vitals, and other markers as necessary, we're able to ensure that all patients can safely be treated at home. Visit our 

for more details on how to medically evaluate a patient for eating disorder treatment.

Length of treatment varies from patient to patient, but the average patient in remission discharges after 51 weeks. This may sound long, but the length of treatment is specifically designed to prevent relapse, which is so common for these illnesses. Additionally, since patients go through treatment from home, treatment doesn’t impede their lives or the lives of their loved ones, and many of our insurance partners provide coverage for at least a year.

Generally, treatment begins as a high-touch process with several appointments per week, and gradually becomes a lower-touch experience as each patient moves through their treatment journey and toward recovery.