Part Seven B: UCSD EDC2014 Review
ICAT Skills Training and Treatment Program
And we’re finally back after almost three months! As you can see, a big part of the radio silence was due to a significant website migration that was underway and you’re now looking at the results of that effort.
What remains of the UCSD EDC2014 Review on the blog is the in-depth look at the ICAT; a set of revelations and insights into binge eating disorder that were the result of the roundtable discussion that followed the ICAT presentation by Drs. Stephen Wonderlich and Carol Peterson [ed. Update 2024: the details on BED became the EDI posts: Binge Eating Disorder One and Two.
So let’s get to working through the details of ICAT. We now enter the Land of the Acronym yet again…
There are eight core skills that are developed within the ICAT approach:
Emotion awareness (FEEL): Focus, Experience, Examine and Label
Meal planning (CARE): Calmly Arrange Regular Eating
Urge management (ACT): Adaptive Coping Techniques
Goal setting (GOAL): Goals and Objectives Affect Life-Moments
Relationships (SAID): Sensitively Assert Ideas and Desires
Self evaluation (REAL): Realistic Expectations Affect Living
Self regulation (SPA): Self-Protect and Accept
Impulse control (WAIT): Watch All Impulses Today
The treatment structure is as follows:
21 sessions, 50-minute sessions twice/week for first month then weekly
Clinician manual and patient workbook
PDA/Smartphone/Paper Wallet coping skills
Four phases of treatment
The development of ICAT has been over ten years in the making and thedriver for developing this treatment modality was to address two fundamental ideas:
Bulimic behaviours serve avoidance and escape functions regarding aversive states of emotion.
Bulimic behaviours may also be a means of promoting positive states of emotion.
And many of you may likely recall I address this positive-negative duality of bulimic behaviours in the post: Techniques Two.
While I might take issue with rigidity in meal planning (because it is actually reinforcing avoidance that only worsens the overall threat responses to food intake), I do believe that ICAT “keeps its eyes on the prize”, so to speak, by paying solid attention to emotion as a source point for treatment.
The ICAT principles encompass the recognition that emotion is a cue for bulimic behaviour. By promoting emotional awareness; identifying and developing strategies to ease emotional intensity; all while helping a patient refuse to enact behaviours that are destructive when she is emotionally distraught; ICAT is tearing a good number of useful pages out of the dialectical behaviour therapy book that helps a patient apply levels of meta-cognition that can take her beyond being a slave to the intense emotion of the moment.
Drs. Wonderlich and Peterson did an excellent job of interweaving actual (anonymous) therapy session dialogue into their slides as a way to demonstrate the challenges faced by patient and therapist. But more importantly it reflected how the emotional challenges are realized for the patient in everyday life.
The techniques taught and reinforced within ICAT are about attempting to modify episodes (moments) and not focus on broader constructs such as personality, attitudes and schema. It’s about learning those skills to manage those moments. It’s about addressing those every day emotional challenges.
The progression is Situation > Emotion > Action. The goal is to understand a bit more of the situational and emotional cues that trigger bulimic behaviour and then to understand what that behaviour’s function might be. From there, the therapist and patient work to identify different responses to those cues that are not bulimic behaviour.
The ICAT treatment phases are as follows:
Phase I: Engagement and education
Phase II: Meal planning and adaptive coping
Phase II: Self-oriented and relationship problems
Phase IV: Relapse prevention and treatment termination.
In Phase I, motivational interviewing features prominently— noting the discrepancies that the patient experiences between the eating disorder symptoms and her broader life goals. By acknowledging there are possible benefits to the symptoms, the therapist doesn’t end up inadvertently getting a patient to defend the very behaviours she has actually come in to address in therapy.
Identifying and naming emotional states is not easy for patients and the therapist takes an active role in Phase I in identifying and naming emotional states and reactions. It introduces the FEEL skill and heightens that critical inner-state awareness that is needed for the development of meta-cognition.
Phase II is the nuts and bolts elements of ‘normalizing’ eating behaviours alongside ongoing monitoring of feelings, situations and drive for bulimic behaviours.
As I have pointed out in multiple other posts on this site, reducing the likelihood of a binge session is counterproductive to training the threat identification system to eventually stand down when it comes to food. Creating rigidity in meal plans and eating times sets a patient up for exacerbated levels of distress when an eating session occurs either in response to ongoing actual energy deficits within the body, or to emotional distress. And as I have also pointed out in other posts, emotional states require energy.
Now certainly if the meal plan provides enough energy and helps the patient to avoid delaying food intake (many bulimics will have eating sessions at the end of the day when they have delayed eating most of the day and are in a state of energy, and therefore cognitive, depletion), then that could buoy them up sufficiently to stabilize mood. In other words, if the patient must eat a good breakfast, snack and lunch before 1 pm, then she is of course far less likely to be so severely energy depleted at the end of the day as to need a recovery eating session at that time.
But this does mean that ICAT’s usefulness within the framework of HDRM has accommodate that it is not the reduction of binge eating that is an end goal of any kind, but rather that everything is building upon techniques and meta-cognition that allow a patient to tolerate the distress of “bingeing” by finding adaptive responses that replace the drive to enact restriction in response to that distress.
The Adaptive Coping Technique (ACT) is taught and practiced during phase two.
Adaptive responses include:
Using the FEEL skill to identify your emotional state.
Being flexible and open-minded.
Thinking about what might help with your recovery and health within that moment.
Coping responses include:
Is there something I can do to solve a core problem here?
Is there something I can do to just help a little bit?
Is this a feeling or situation that cannot be changed?
Is it time to self-soothe?
Is it time for distraction?
Would my bulimic behaviors really help at this moment?
Technique responses include:
Coping is a learned skill and it improves with practice.
What might help me cope just a bit better right now?
I won’t go into all the acronym techniques listed above, but the ACT information gives you a good example of how on-the-ground and practical much of the ICAT program is.
Phase III is getting into all the interpersonal patterns, self-regulation and self-evaluation that tend to push patients into distressful emotional states that lead to bulimic behaviours.
While building on all the skills from Phases I and II, now the patient and therapist together look at the following core questions:
“Is there a pronounced interpersonal disturbance that interferes with recovery?”
“Is there a pronounced self-evaluation problem (self-discrepancy) related to failure to meet standards that interferes with recovery?”
“Is there a pronounced pattern of self-regulatory behaviour that interferes with recovery?”
“Do interpersonal, self-regulatory, and self-discrepancy behaviours interact meaningfully?”
The key strategies for social problem solving within the ICAT approach as as follows:
Assert
Stay the same
Disengage
Separate
Fight
The therapist applies role playing to help the patient explore these interpersonal resolution options. It helps to consider that whatever the path, it doesn’t always work out and that tolerating outcomes can be explored prior to taking any action in the patient’s “real life”.
The focus on self-regulating behaviour has to do with the go-to behaviour style under stress and it will usually fall within one of these three categories:
Self-critical
Self-controlling
Self-neglect
The antidote is SPA (self protect accept).
Within the self-evaluation behaviours, the focus is on a tendency towards actual vs. desired self-discrepancy. In this state, positive attributes are discounted; there are unrealistic and perfectionistic standards at play; and a chronic experience of shame, frustration and inadequacy is present.
And the key strategies for narrowing that gap of actual vs. desired standards are to do the following:
Identify the core standards and assess the size of the discrepancy and the probability of attainment for the desired state.
Assess the purpose or function of that standard and how that fits within the history of standards you have set.
Are their concerns about changing that standard to pull it more in line with a realistic outcome? And might not new, more adaptive standards be worth investigating?
Phase III is delving into experiences that are particularly emotionally dysregulating and trying to develop new ways of managing those experiences all while continuing with awareness training, good eating and urge management.
Phase IV is relapse prevention and treatment termination. The basics of lapse management include the promotion of the ideas that recovery requires vigilance, flexibility and practice. Phases II-IV of ICAT work very well with the HDRM for remission from an eating disorder. Any time I see a program that formally recognizes that remission is a practice I’m vehemently nodding my head in agreement.
The ICAT program explains the distinction and risk factors between lapses and relapses and encourages self-awareness as a key tool for reversing those states.
The remaining 16 slides in the presentation went through all the clinical data pertaining to how ICAT stacks up against other treatment protocols, specifically CBT-e (Enhanced Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). The short answer is that it is equivalently effective as a treatment approach for bulimia as is CBT-e.
Wonderlich, S. A., Peterson, C. B., Crosby, R. D., Smith, T. L., Klein, M. H., Mitchell, J. E., & Crow, S. J. (2014). A randomized controlled comparison of integrative cognitive-affective therapy (ICAT) and enhanced cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT-E) for bulimia nervosa. Psychological medicine, 44(03), 543-553.
Wonderlich, S. A., Engel, S. G., Peterson, C. B., Robinson, M. D., Crosby, R. D., Mitchell, J. E., ... & Simonich, H. K. (2008). Examining the conceptual model of integrative cognitive‐affective therapy for BN: Two assessment studies. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 41(8), 748-754.
