During the ten years that Naomi Brown, Ph.D., has served as an eating disorders treatment specialist at Stanford’s Vaden Health Center, she said that she has never witnessed a shortage of students affected by eating disorders.

“As years have gone by, we are seeing students with much more severe symptoms,” Brown said.

Vaden offers a comprehensive eating disorders program with a team of multidisciplinary health care professionals that make recommendations to the level of treatment that would be most helpful to the patient.

In the past, patients that required a level of care that exceeded the outpatient services offered at Vaden were referred to an outside program.

Now, undergraduates have another option. The Comprehensive Eating Disorders Program at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital is expanding to treat young adults ages 18 to 21, partly in response to the growing need on campus for more specialized care. The recent expansion of the Packard program opens the facility to the Stanford undergraduate community.

“It was pretty clear that there were a lot of problems on campus with eating disorders,” said James Lock, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Packard Children’s Hospital. “These were clear needs that we were trying to meet.”

Therapies are tailored at Packard to the specific family dilemma, age and circumstance of each patient, Lock said. Treatment also frequently involves utilizing the support of the family.

“For a long time, parents were blamed for their children’s anorexia,” Lock said. “But the evidence is against that. This treatment radically shifts that perspective.”

Undergraduates with family residing outside the Bay Area will be treated on a case-by-case basis, Lock said. It is not yet clear whether Cardinal Care will cover the Packard program.