Malnutrition can impair cognitive functioning in adolescents with anorexia nervosa, and similar effects have been documented in other eating disorders. Rather than working only through parents, IMT handouts are written to be developmentally appropriate and visually engaging — with mindfulness exercises made concrete (recording internal experience on structured handouts; recorded nature sounds during grounding exercises) so patients are taught skills, not triggered, even when concentration is difficult.
Our Mission
Zero. That's how much eating disorder training most clinicians get.
Graduate programs rarely include formal coursework on treating eating disorders, so clinicians are left to learn on the job — often without material built for how fragile and easily triggered this population can be. We built Integrative Modalities Therapy (IMT) to give clinicians, and the parents supporting a child through recovery, exactly what to say and how to say it — turning an unwieldy, often dangerous recovery process into something structured and manageable.
Where IMT began
We kept building the same thing separately. So we built it together.
Almost no one gets formalized training on treating eating disorders before they're licensed. Like many clinicians in the trenches, we had each independently scraped together our own compilations of interventions — pulled from published research, conference presentations, and manuals that never made it past a single training program — just to have something to say to the patient in front of us. We knew intuitively that this knowledge needed to be curated and consolidated rather than endlessly reinvented, one clinician at a time.
We cannot waste time divided by deference to our own pet philosophies when the research has already shown that multiple modalities of treatment have merit. So we set out to pool what was already known to work, and organize it into one thorough, integrated collection — Integrative Modalities Therapy.
Over time, three of these integrated collections became individual, group, and family treatment modules — designed to be used flexibly, based on what a given patient actually needs, not delivered identically to everyone.
What "integrative" means here
IMT synthesizes core techniques from established, evidence-based modalities — including CBT, DBT-informed skills, and mindfulness and acceptance-based work — into a single, coordinated package built specifically for adolescents with eating disorders.
It is designed to travel across the full range of care: inpatient, residential, day treatment, and outpatient — not written for one setting alone.
Our design philosophy
Complex clinical content, made crystal-clear
We knew that a full package of individual, group, and family interventions could feel overwhelming — not just for clinicians in the trenches, but for patients struggling with an eating disorder and for the family members supporting them. So our first and most important goal became implementation: using techniques from information design to make dense clinical material simple, without making it simplistic.
Parents are often the ones actually running this treatment at home, with no training of their own and a child whose illness can make ordinary meals feel dangerous. Instead of asking families to read an entire book, IMT gives small, clearly enumerated handouts across multiple sessions — the same carefully worded material clinicians use — so parents know exactly what to say, not just what to do, as symptoms decrease and a caregiver's sense of mastery builds.
Graduate training almost never includes a dedicated course on treating eating disorders, so most clinicians reach licensure without ever having been taught how to run this specific, high-stakes work. IMT is evidence-based treatment in a box — a structured protocol with the exact language for what to say and how to say it, so a recovery process that's otherwise unwieldy, and can be dangerous, becomes something structured and manageable.
Standardized and individualized
Not standardized or individualized. Both.
Because patients receive core conceptual information in a streamlined, handout-driven format, session time is freed up for what actually requires a clinician's judgment: the individual patient in front of them. A comprehensive set of interventions means a therapist is spared the effort of re-explaining every core concept from scratch with each new patient — which means more time, not less, for individualized care.
"We hope that if we can help clinicians become more able to treat eating disorders, they may also become more willing to do so."
That is the throughline of everything IMT does: help patients build skills, support the families around them, give clinicians a way to communicate core treatment concepts efficiently — and, in doing so, help close the treatment gap and standardize care across the field.
How you can help
IMT was refined for five years by clinicians like you. It still is.
The manual was shaped by direct feedback from the clinicians who used it, long before it was published. That collaboration didn't end at publication — it's still how IMT improves.
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