Renfrew Center Case Study Answers

1. What was the Renfrew Center and where is it located?
The Renfrew Center is a residential facility located in Florida established for the treatment of women who struggle with eating disorders. They use a step system that grants patients less restrictions and more privileges as they continue to improve overtime while in the facility. This system is designed to help prevent the risk of relapsing and teach them mechanisms to live healthy productive lives on their own.
2. What was a typical day like at the Renfrew Center?
A typical day at Renfrew consists of daily therapy sessions for patients. These sessions vary from individual and group. They also consisted of meal times, each patient was given specific dietary needs from their nutritionists.

The documentary follows four women who are admitted into the facility for different forms of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. The documentary was made to highlight how females deal with their body image and to bring awareness as to how body imagery can result into eating disorders and how the Renfrew Center helps these women to overcome this struggle. Brittany is a 15-year-old student who was admitted to Renfrew with liver damage, a low heart rate and hair loss after dropping from 185 to 97 pounds. She says that she was a compulsive overeater from the age of 8. She mentions how a bad body image and a need to be accepted by her peers were the motivation to her weight loss. This need to be accepted lead into compulsive dieting and anorexia from the age of 12. According to Brittany, her mother also has an eating disorder, and they would binge chew bags of candy together and then spit it out. Throughout the film Brittany is resistant to undergoing treatment, because she just wants to be thin. She tells her nutritionist she has purged twelve times since entering Renfrew and walks out of group therapy in tears when her dedication to

She has a relapse before leaving which causes concern among the staff but still leaves although it was against their medical advice. In the end of the film we learn that she has another relapse and began to continue to rapidly lose weight. Shelly is a 25-year-old psychiatric nurse who admits herself into the center after ten hospitalizations. She enters the Center at the beginning of the film with a feeding tube that was surgically implanted in her stomach. She arrived weighing only 84.3 pounds, having been anorexic for six years and tube fed for five of those years. She has an identical twin, Kelly, who does not have an eating disorder. Along with her eating disorder she suffers from a dependence on various mood stabilizers and tranquilizers that she claims helped her to cope with her depression. She forms a close friendship with Polly, another patient in the Center. Throughout the film she has verbal altercations with some of the staff who accuse her of still purging. In the end of the film we earn that after discharge she lost 17 pounds, went back to being a nurse, is married and continues to struggle with her disorder. Polly has been at Renfrew for six weeks and admitted herself after a suicide attempt over two slices of