At my initial consultation I was given a variety of patient information sheets to complete and bring back at my assessment appointment. Most of the forms were standard: personal medical history, family medical history, etc., but there was also an extensive section that dealt with personal relationships that forced me to think about the people I choose to include in my life and to evaluate them in terms of closeness and the positive/negative effect they had in my life. I really enjoyed being forced to objectively evaluate an otherwise emotionally driven set of choices.
The assessment lasted a couple of hours and was pretty painless. There were some measurements taken, weight, blood pressure, etc., and then we sat down and went through my paperwork, pausing to discuss things that were unclear or particularly relevant, and then arriving at a diagnosis: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Depression, and Eating Disorder, NOS with Binge-eating.
The anxiety/depression disorders were not at all surprising - I had Web-MD diagnosed myself with those things a thousand times. The eating disorder was a harder pill to swallow. It sort of felt like a sucker punch. I mean, I have a lot of weight to lose so I obviously have disordered eating, but "eating disorder" always seemed to me like something that was dealt with by the star of an ABC Afterschool Special. I learned a lot about anorexia and bulimia growing up - someone suffered with one or the other of those things in every teenage drama - but no one talked about the disordered eating that happens at the other end of the spectrum. In some ways having a label makes me feel more in control - identify and define a problem and you can find a solution. In other ways it feels somewhat oppressive.
I am going to work on coming to terms with the terms.
More on week one shortly - it is exciting stuff.
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