Exploring the Ruling Relations of Eating Disorder Treatment in Ontario

Background Despite close to 50 years of calls for change, ‘good care’ in ED treatment often pivots on control of clients, including of their bodies, consumption patterns, spaces, and routines. Recently the Government of Ontario released new quality standards for ED treatment, which promise to alter how the system operates. This has occurred against a backdrop of an unprecedented surge in the volume of people with EDs seeking help following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic deepening the strain on an already under-resourced treatment system. As such, we contend there is a need to explore how clinicians do carework in treatment spaces to better understand what organizational, procedural, and discursive factors coordinate/ regulate their capacities to care in the current moment and explore what new pathways might be forged. Taking an Institutional Ethnography (IE) approach, our study explores the ruling relations coordinating clinicians’ carework in Ontario inpatient, day-patient, and live-in ED treatment programs. Methods Methods included in-depth interviews with six clinicians and textual analysis of core documents informing or directing treatment. Clinicians included one psychiatrist, two dieticians, one psychologist, one social worker, and one psychotherapist. Our analysis drew from accepted IE analytic procedures, and included indexing, mapping, and writing accounts. Findings Our IE identifies a tension experienced by clinicians, particularly in publicly-funded treatment between their desire to practice collaborative care in an environment dominated by highly standardized, time-limited treatment directives that seek to ration care. We explicate how the discourses of care-as-cure and gold standard (evidence-based) treatment coordinate clinician’s carework in moments of treatment non-adherence, as they operate through relations of informal coercion and the broader politics of research. Conclusions As the first IE in the ED field, our work traces connections between practice, texts, and institutional discourses in a novel way, adding compelling findings to the limited Canadian ED treatment literature and the urgent need for change. Our IE findings underscore the need to de-centre biometrics and recentre relationality by developing alternative care pathways that attend to the diversity of service user needs and address gaps in care.