Considerations of Access and Inclusion in Adolescent Eating Disorder Care: A Custom Rapid Report

Key Messages

• This custom rapid report provides insight into some challenges of equitable access to and inclusion in specialized eating disorder care for racialized, LGBTQ2S+, and male adolescents living with distress related to body image, eating, and food. To do this work, the author of this custom report engaged with empirical and conceptual literature around adolescent eating disorders and investigates how access and inclusion have been conceptualized in that literature.
• Equitable access to specialized and inclusive eating disorder care for racialized, LGBTQ2S+, and male adolescents can be hampered by reductive understandings of these adolescents’ needs and experiences of distress around eating and body image. Similarly, diagnostic categories, diagnostic assessment tools, and treatments designed with and for the archetype of the young, white, cisgender woman living with an eating disorder, reduce the understanding of adolescents not fitting this archetype. Cultural competency training and practising cultural humility were both described as supportive elements in working toward providing equitable access to inclusive eating disorder care.
• A series of sensitizing questions are provided at the end of this report and are meant to support the CADTH team in remaining attentive to considerations of equity of access and inclusivity as they assess early intervention programs for adolescents living with eating disorders in an upcoming health technology assessment.