Last year, she spent two months at Eating Recovery Center in Denver, moving from residential care to day treatment, and began to gain control of her illness. “E.R.C. was the best place I’ve been,” she said about the center. “They were very individualized.”
Ashley Bilkie, 29, had a different experience with E.R.C. When she returned home in February 2015 after about six months in the Denver program — her fourth stay in an inpatient program for treatment of anorexia and her second at E.R.C. — “I was getting sicker and sicker,” she said. She lost the weight she had gained back at the center. “I had to buy children’s clothing,” she said.
She was evasive with her parents. At the recovery center, she said, “It was kind of like they set up a battle between myself and my parents.” For their part, Ms. Bilkie’s parents, who for years had watched their daughter’s health decline, grew frantic. Ms. Bilkie would disappear, her father, Robert Bilkie, said, and he would find her wandering the aisles at Kroger or Target. Driving through the neighborhood, he half-expected to see her hanging from a tree.
“It’s a parent’s worst nightmare,” he said.
It was also expensive. Mr. Bilkie, a financial adviser in Michigan, calculated that over three years, he paid at least $350,000 for unreimbursed inpatient care for his daughter. The Eating Recovery Center, he said, sent him bills for $30,000 each month. Mr. Bilkie paid willingly — he was desperate to see Ashley get well, he said — but no program seemed to produce lasting results.
“We spent an outrageous amount of money for what really amounted to ineffectual treatment,” Mr. Bilkie said.
