12/17/2025
A New Path to Healing: Funding a Clinical Hypnosis Study for Anorexia and Bulimia
For many families, eating disorders are not abstract diagnoses but devastating, often preventable losses. When my older sister was seventeen, she lost her best friend to pneumonia secondary to anorexia; her malnourished body simply could not fight off a routine infection. Decades later, now in her late sixties, my sister lost another close friend to the same illness, this time driven by years of feeling controlled by her husband, with restrictive eating becoming the only arena where she felt she had any control at all. These are not isolated tragedies; they are part of a wider crisis that has sharply accelerated over the past five years.
Across multiple countries, new cases of eating disorders have risen markedly, especially among adolescents and young adults. During the COVID‑19 pandemic, emergency‑department visits and hospital admissions for eating disorders in youth dramatically increased, with some systems reporting well over a 50 percent rise in emergency visits and large spikes in the number of young people needing medical stabilization. Lockdowns, school closures, masking policies, and prolonged social isolation disrupted normal routines, cut off in‑person connections, and increased time online, all conditions that fueled body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and full‑blown eating disorders in vulnerable young people.
This is no longer a “girls’ problem.” Male rates are climbing, with boys and men now engaging in extreme dieting, steroid abuse, laxative misuse, purging, and compulsive overexercise in pursuit of unattainable muscular ideals. More children are showing serious eating disorder symptoms as early as eight years old. The earlier the onset, the longer and more severe the course is likely to be if treatments do not truly work. Without effective intervention, these illnesses can shape an entire life.
What Families Are Paying Now: Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars, Little Hope
In the face of this crisis, families are being financially and emotionally drained by a treatment system that too often fails to deliver lasting recovery.
Typical costs in the current system include:
Inpatient hospitalization for medical stabilization, often 2–6 weeks, costing tens of thousands of dollars for a single stay.
Residential treatment programs, charging roughly four to five figures per day, easily reaching tens to over a hundred thousand dollars for 30–60 days.
Partial hospitalization programs are adding thousands more per week, and intensive outpatient programs are adding thousands per month.
Ongoing outpatient psychotherapy with specialists, plus dietitians, psychiatrists, and other providers, layering on hundreds to thousands of dollars more every month.
When clinicians map out a realistic “full course” of care from initial hospitalization through residential, day programs, intensive outpatient, and long‑term outpatient follow‑up, the total cost for one person commonly reaches into the range of 120,000 to 250,000 dollars or more over two years. Insurance rarely covers this seamlessly. Families exhaust savings, take on debt, postpone retirement, and sometimes forgo care for other family members just to keep a loved one alive and in treatment.
The emotional toll is just as severe. Parents become case managers, advocates, and constant sentinels, constantly monitoring meals, bathrooms, exercise, weight, and mood, ever vigilant for relapse. Siblings learn to quiet their own needs in the shadow of the illness. Partners and spouses watch someone they love fade behind obsessive rituals and medical crises, often developing depression or trauma responses of their own. Perhaps worst of all, families are told, explicitly or implicitly, that full recovery is unlikely; the goal is to “manage” the illness, not to heal it.
They pay dearly in money, time, and hope, yet relapse rates remain high, and many cycle repeatedly through programs that provide only temporary relief.
Why the Medical Model Is Not Enough
The dominant approach to eating disorders is rooted in a medical model that treats these conditions as chronic, relapsing illnesses. The response emphasizes symptom management through lengthy talk therapy and medications, even though no medication cures anorexia or bulimia. Public and professional attention is increasingly focused on so‑called “miracle” weight‑loss drugs for higher‑weight individuals, despite serious concerns about long‑term effects, while people with anorexia and bulimia are left with a fragmented system that often assumes they will never fully recover.
This model is deeply pessimistic. It tends to see pathology first and the person second. It often neglects the unconscious beliefs, emotional trauma, identity conflicts, and relational patterns that drive self‑destructive eating, and it rarely addresses them in ways that create deep, lasting change. Patients internalize the expectation that their illness is a life sentence, and clinicians, constrained by training and systems, often expect little more than symptom reduction.
There is another way to understand and treat these illnesses.
A Different Philosophy: Hypnotic Approaches to Full Recovery
Those of us who practice hypnotic techniques with eating‑disorder clients begin from a different premise: that many people with anorexia and bulimia can fully heal, provided they fall within clear clinical parameters and receive the right kind of help. Hypnosis is not stage magic; it is a set of structured methods that help clients access and transform the unconscious beliefs, emotional wounds, and identity structures that keep the disorder in place. For the right clients, these methods can rapidly change how they relate to themselves, their bodies, and food.
Over several decades of clinical work with anorexic and bulimic clients, combined with eight years of formal academic research, I have seen these methods consistently produce outcomes that traditional treatments rarely achieve. Clients do not just gain weight or reduce purging; they resolve the underlying conflicts that drove them to starve, binge, or purge in the first place and move into lives that feel meaningful and self‑directed.
This approach is grounded in:
Advanced clinical hypnosis, neuro‑linguistic programming (NLP), and Time Line Therapy® at the trainer level.
Over three decades of experience with complex psychiatric and medically fragile clients, including those with anorexia and bulimia, and additional medical conditions such as type 1 diabetes.
1.5 years of Licensed Practical Nursing education and six years providing hands‑on care for more than 200 elder patients in home health, giving a deep understanding of the body’s systems and the impact of chronic stress and malnutrition.
Recognizing that effective treatment depends not only on what is taught but on how it is learned, I invested 18 months in a master’s program in Instructional Design & Technology. That program allowed the development of a training curriculum for mental health providers that is grounded in how adults learn best, and that includes the specific components needed to move clinicians from theoretical knowledge to actual clinical competence with hypnotic methods.
For the past 1.5 years, I have been in a doctoral program in psychology with a specific goal: to conduct a formal research study on how well state‑licensed mental health providers can learn and apply this hypnotic treatment program with their own anorexic and bulimic patients.
The Institutional Barrier: Why This Study Must Be Independent
Through this doctoral work, a harsh reality became clear: this study will almost certainly never be allowed to run inside a conventional academic institution. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are understandably cautious with populations they classify as “vulnerable,” and eating‑disorder patients fall squarely into that category because of both their psychiatric diagnoses and the relatively young age of many patients.
In practice, this means that a study which trains clinicians to apply a non‑standard, hypnotic treatment model in real‑world outpatient care, and follows their patients for two years, is likely to be blocked by layers of institutional risk‑aversion, politics, and rigidity. The more innovative and real‑world the design, the less acceptable it tends to be to large, conservative ethics structures.
This leaves two choices:
Give up on ever formally testing whether other clinicians can replicate the success seen with my own anorexic and bulimic clients.
Or find an ethical, rigorous way to run the study independently, outside of traditional academic systems, while still protecting patients and supporting clinicians.
This appeal represents that second path.
The Research Study: Design and Rationale
Core question:�Can conventionally trained, state‑licensed mental health providers learn and effectively deliver a structured hypnotic treatment protocol for anorexia and bulimia in outpatient practice, with outcomes that support sustained recovery and reduced relapse over two years?
Who Will Be Involved?
20 state‑licensed mental health providers (such as psychologists, social workers, counselors, or psychiatric nurses) actively treating clients with anorexia or bulimia in outpatient settings.
These providers will be trained in the hypnotic protocol and supported as they implement it with carefully selected clients in their existing caseloads by me.
How the Study Will Work
Training phase�Providers receive comprehensive training in the hypnotic treatment program, which was developed during my 18‑month master’s program in Instructional Design & Technology specifically to be teachable and applicable in real practice. The curriculum is grounded in adult‑learning principles so that busy clinicians can move from theory to confident use of the techniques.
Screening and patient selection�The trainees use their existing clinical expertise, plus clear guidelines, to determine who is appropriate for this model. The protocol is not for everyone. It is designed for patients who are:
Diagnosed with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.
Medically stable enough to be treated as outpatients or medically monitored in parallel.
Cognitively able to focus and engage in hypnotic processes.
Certain groups are explicitly excluded because this model is not safe or effective for them:
Individuals with full‑blown personality disorders (such as borderline personality disorder) when these patterns undermine engagement and stability.
Individuals with active psychosis or severe thought disorder.
Individuals with intellectual disability (IQ below approximately 70).
Individuals requiring immediate medical stabilization or inpatient care.
Individuals in acute suicidal crisis.
This careful screening protects vulnerable individuals and focuses the study on the patients most likely to benefit.
Two years of real‑world treatment and follow‑up�Over 24 months, each trained provider will:
Deliver the hypnotic protocol to appropriate clients as part of outpatient therapy.
Document changes in eating‑disorder symptoms, body image, and functioning using standardized measures.
Track relapse, defined not just as weight loss or symptom return, but as a broader pattern of returning to disordered behaviors.
Collect structured feedback from clients on their experience with the treatment and its impact on their lives.
Year three: Analysis and a Book for the World�The third year focuses on analyzing the data and writing a book that translates the findings into accessible language for clinicians, patients, and families. The book will:
Present the outcomes and what they mean for the future of treatment for anorexics and bulimics.
Offer case examples (with identities protected) that illustrate how the approach works.
Provide clear guidance for clinicians on learning and implementing this model.
Give hope and practical information to families and individuals seeking alternatives to the cycle of endless, expensive treatment.
The Budget: A Fraction of What One Patient’s Treatment Costs
This entire three‑year project including training 20 clinicians, following their patients for two years, analyzing results, and publishing a book, is expected to cost between $119,600 and $216,600 with a working midpoint of about $175,000.
The budget includes:
Living costs for three years in Albania (where I will base myself to keep costs low), allowing full‑time focus on training, coordination, and analysis.
Study operations over two years: training design and delivery, supervision and consultation for 20 providers, secure data collection and storage, and modest incentives for clients who complete feedback.
Professional book production and launch, including editing, design, formatting, and initial distribution.
In contrast, the current system routinely spends 120,000 to 250,000 dollars or more to treat a single person with an eating disorder over two years, often without achieving lasting recovery. This project costs less than one typical full treatment trajectory, yet it has the potential to influence the care of hundreds of people as trained clinicians apply the method across their caseloads, year after year, while being able to deliver it for one-tenth the cost, bulimics being fully recovered in 6 months on average, and anorexics being fully recovered on average in 8 months. Quite an improvement over the current never-ending medically-based treatment models.
Call to Action: Turn Loss into Lasting Rapid Change Hypnosis
If you are reading this, you may already know what it means to watch someone you love disappear behind an eating disorder. You may have sat beside a hospital bed, wondering how you would pay the next bill. You may have spent years walking on eggshells around food, meals, and conversations, terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing. You may have lost someone, or fear you might.
This project is an invitation to transform that grief, anger, and exhaustion into something that can change other families’ stories.
By choosing to support this research, you are not funding yet another iteration of the same treatments that have already failed so many. You are helping to test and document an approach that has already brought deep, lasting healing in one practitioner’s work, and to determine whether it can be taught to and used effectively by state‑licensed clinicians across different settings.
Your contribution will:
Train 20 mental health professionals who are already on the front lines with anorexic and bulimic clients.
Support two years of structured follow‑up to see whether their clients can sustain recovery, not just manage symptoms.
Make possible the analysis and publication of a book that can bring this approach to clinicians, patients, and families worldwide.
If you have lost someone to an eating disorder, if you are fighting one now, or if you simply refuse to accept that “managing symptoms” is the best we can offer, this is a concrete way to help build something different. You can choose to give in honor of a sister, a friend, a child, a partner, to let their struggle, or their memory, be part of the reason another family gets a different outcome.
The current system drains families financially and emotionally while too often failing to heal. This project asks a simple, urgent question:
If we train clinicians in a recovery‑oriented hypnotic approach, can we help their anorexic and bulimic patients truly heal?
With your help, the answer can be discovered and shared with the world.
\
Here is the budget that is required. Since I live in Albania, my living cost are very low compared to living in the U.S. The entire training process can be done over the internet, keeping those costs very low as well. The difference between doing this research independently is $175,00 versus over $200,000 if I were able to do the research in an academic institution with all the fees involved.
Estimated Total Cost: UAGC Doctorate Route for This Study
Cost category What it covers with the Low (USD) and High (USD) Given for each entry:
Standard program (coursework + 1 dissertation year)
Core doctoral tuition & fees 60–62 credits, tech fees, books/materials 54,720 56,944
Standard dissertation year – UAGC Dissertation tuition, fees, books, misc. 17,265 28,915
Standard dissertation year – living 1,600/month × 12 months 19,200 19,200
Subtotal – standard program Coursework + 1 dissertation year 91,185 105,059
Three additional dissertation/defense years:
Extra dissertation year 1 – UAGC Added dissertation enrollment (year 1) 17,265 28,915
Extra dissertation year 1 – living 1,600/month × 12 months 19,200 19,200
Extra dissertation year 2 – UAGC Added dissertation enrollment (year 2) 17,265 28,915
Extra dissertation year 2 – living 1,600/month × 12 months 19,200 19,200
Extra dissertation year 3 – UAGC Added dissertation enrollment (year 3) 17,265 28,915
Extra dissertation year 3 – living 1,600/month × 12 months 19,200 19,200
Subtotal – 3 added years Three extra dissertation/defense years 109,395 143,145
Grand total – UAGC-based route All university charges + living for all years 200,580 248,204
INDEPENDENT PROJECT BUDGET: A Three-Year Investment
Cost category What it covers the Low estimate (USD) and High estimate (USD)
Living and basic project support:
Living expenses (3 years) 1,600/month × 36 months 57,600 57,600
Project operations Software, secure data storage, transcription, supplies 5,000 10,000
Travel and meetings Local travel and occasional in‑person meetings 2,000 6,000
Subtotal – living + basic ops 64,600 73,600
Independent research advisor (3 years)
Advisor fees 10–15 hrs/month × 36 months × 75–150/hr 27,000 81,000
Subtotal – advisor Ongoing design, methods, ethics, and analysis support 27,000 81,000
Study implementation:
Training design and materials Curriculum refinement, manuals, templates 5,000 10,000
Clinician supervision and consultation Group and individual supervision for clinicians 8,000 18,000
Participant incentives Modest thank‑you gifts for completed assessments 3,000 6,000
Data management and analysis Statistical support and qualitative coding as needed 4,000 10,000
Subtotal – implementation 20,000 44,000
Dissemination (book and related materials)
Editing and indexing Professional editing and index 4,000 8,000
Design and formatting Interior layout and cover design 2,000 4,000
Launch and outreach Initial marketing, web updates, and advance copies 2,000 4,000
Subtotal – dissemination 8,000 16,000
Grand total – independent study All costs over 3 years, including advisor and dissemination 119,600 214,600
The total budget for this three-year project is $119,600 to $214,600 USD, with a mid-range estimate of $175,000.
This breaks down as follows:
Estimated Cost: Independent 3‑Year Study
Budget Details
Living Costs (3 years: $45,000–$54,000)
I will conduct this research while living in Albania, where a modest but comfortable standard of living costs approximately $1,250 USD per month. This covers rent, utilities, food, transportation, and basic healthcare.
Over three years (two years of data collection plus one year for analysis and writing), this amounts to approximately $45,000.
This is significantly lower than the cost of living in Western Europe or North America, allowing the research to proceed with limited overhead.
Study Operations (2 years: $15,000–$40,000)
This category covers:
Trainee training and consultation (~$500–$2,000 per trainee over two years): For 20 trainees, this totals $10,000–$40,000 depending on the intensity of supervision. At the lean end, this reflects mostly remote group consultation sessions and self-directed study. At the higher end, it includes regular individual consultation calls and higher-touch supervision.
Data systems and management (~$2,000–$5,000 over two years): Secure, HIPAA-compliant platforms for collecting and storing outcome data, plus basic data entry and preliminary analysis support.
Patient and provider incentives (~$3,000–$5,000 over two years): Small gift cards or vouchers to thank patients for completing structured feedback surveys; modest acknowledgment honoraria for trainees' administrative time in collecting and submitting data.
Book Production and Launch ($2,000–$5,000)
Self-publishing a professionally edited, well-designed nonfiction book includes:
Developmental and copyediting: $1,000–$2,500
Proofreading: $300–$500
Interior formatting and design: $300–$600
Cover design: $300–$500
Initial print run and/or ISBN/distribution setup: $200–$1,000
At the lean end, some editing and design work is accomplished with minimal external help. At the higher end, all services are professionally managed, ensuring maximum quality and broader distribution reach.
Comparison to Existing Treatment Costs
To put this in perspective:
This research project, total cost: $76,000 (mid-range)
Cost to treat ONE adolescent for anorexia nervosa (hospital + residential + outpatient): $120,000–$250,000
Cost of inpatient hospitalization alone: $19,000–$38,000 for 2–6 weeks
Cost of residential treatment: $36,000–$180,000 for 30–60 days
In other words, this entire three-year research project—which will train 20 clinicians and produce both research findings and a dissemination book which costs less than treating a single patient with the current medical model. And the patients treated by the trained clinicians will not be charged by the research team; they are treated as part of the providers' regular practice, using existing insurance or out-of-pocket resources.
The downstream impact is multiplicative: If the 20 trained clinicians each treat 10–20 patients with anorexia or bulimia over their careers, this investment influences the care of 200–400 individuals, potentially preventing the kind of endless, costly, unsuccessful treatment cycles that have become standard.
THE CASE FOR FUNDING THIS RESEARCH
What the current system costs families:
$250,000+ for two years of "standard" treatment with uncertain outcomes.
Years of emotional trauma, caregiver burden, and family disruption.
High relapse rates even after extensive, expensive intervention.
A message of hopelessness: "You will manage this illness your whole life."
What this research offers:
A testable alternative. A rigorously trained, replicable protocol for hypnotic treatment of eating disorders, delivered by state-licensed providers in real-world outpatient settings.
Evidence of trainee competence. Clear data on whether mental health providers trained in conventional models can learn and effectively apply this approach.
Real-world outcomes. Two-year follow-up data on relapse, symptom change, and patient experience in diverse outpatient practices.
A dissemination pathway. A professionally published book that makes both the evidence and the protocol accessible to clinicians, patients, and families.
A cost-effective alternative. A model that can be scaled and delivered within existing mental health practice structures, without requiring expensive new facilities or levels of care.
Hope! For the families now being told that eating disorders are lifelong illnesses, and for the growing number of children and young people whose eating disorders are being caught earlier, this research offers something the medical model cannot: evidence-based, recovery-oriented treatment aimed at genuine healing, not symptom management.
For funders, this investment represents:
The chance to shift the needle on a serious, growing, and inadequately treated psychiatric condition.
Support for a clinician-researcher with deep expertise, formal training in both clinical practice and instructional design, and a track record of client success.
A project designed for real-world implementation and broad dissemination.
A return on investment measured not just in research findings, but in recovered lives.
CONCLUSION
For my sister and the many others who have watched loved ones suffer from eating disorders, and for the thousands of young people now developing these illnesses at ever-earlier ages, the current system has failed. It is expensive, often ineffective, and rooted in hopelessness.
This research project offers a concrete, testable, funded pathway to something better. It asks a simple but urgent question: If we train mental health providers in a recovery-oriented hypnotic approach, can we help their anorexic and bulimic patients heal?
The answer will matter for countless families.
Total Project Budget: $119,600 USD to $214,600 (3 years)�Mid-range estimate: $175,000 USD
Link for Donation:
UPDATE December 15th, 2025 Much has changed since I began the doctoral program at the University of Arizona Global Campus. The objective of my doctoral study was to empirically test the training I developed during my Master’s in Design & Technology. The reason for this objective was to hav
