#109: Reconnecting with Yourself with Mary Tantillo

Dr. Mary Tantillo is a Professor of Clinical Nursing at the University of Rochester School of Nursing and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. Dr. Tantillo is a fellow and previous board member of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED). She served as chairperson for the AED Credentialing Task Force and as co-chairperson for the AED Patient/Carer Committee and was awarded the Meehan-Hartley Award for Public Service and Advocacy by the AED in 2010.

Since 2005 Dr. Tantillo has been the Director of the Western New York Comprehensive Care Center for Eating Disorders (WNYCCCED), one of three NY State Office of Mental Health-funded CCCED’s. As part of this work she and the WNYCCCED team initiated Project ECHO® Eating Disorders in January 2017 and School-Based Project  ECHO® Eating Disorders in 2018. Project ECHO® provides primary care, behavioral health care, and college health care practitioners, and school personnel with case-based telementoring and tele education related to best practices for early identification, assessment, prevention, and treatment of eating disorders.

Additionally, in 2010 Dr. Tantillo founded The Healing Connection (THC), a free-standing, non-profit 501(c) 3 NY State Office of Mental Health-licensed Eating Disorders Facility for adults and adolescents. THC offers partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient treatment, and outpatient treatment. She is currently assisting THC with the foundation of a new adolescent eating disorders residential program scheduled to launch in Spring 2022.

Over the past 10 years Dr. Tantillo partnered with patients and families to develop a new and innovative relationally and motivationally-informed multifamlly therapy group approach to treating Anorexia Nervosa in young adults called “Reconnecting for Recovery.” Dr. Tantillo obtained grant-funding from the Hilda and Preston Davis Foundation to conduct a pilot study of this intervention and the results, along with a decade of research, clinical observation, theory, and patient and family lived experience, informed her recently published treatment manual, “Multifamily Therapy Group for Young Adults with Anorexia Nervosa: Reconnecting for Recovery.”

We discuss topics including:

• How to empower and enfoster the young adult
• How to know when you are speaking to the young adult vs. the eating disorder voice
• Empower and foster autonomy
• Challenging “we”
• Differentiate from the family of origin