Beyond the DSM: Embedding Lived Experience into Eating Disorder Education for Pre-registration Nursing Students

Traditionally, eating disorders education for nursing students has been delivered through the DSM-V diagnostic criteria drawing on a clinically focused perspective, lacking insights from those with lived experience. This contradicts the recovery-oriented, person- and family-centred, trauma-informed, and strengths-based approaches recommended by the best practice Australian National Eating Disorders Strategy 2023-2033.
To prepare our graduates to provide care that aligns with this strategy we embedded “Shannon’s workshop” into our curriculum. This workshop was co-produced with lived and learned experience experts using critical perspectives and insights to challenge the dominant biomedical approach to eating disorders education. Instead, the complexities of what life is really like living with and recovering from an eating disorder is honoured. The centrepiece of the workshop is a narrative portrait infused with artefacts rich in symbology and story, to challenge students concrete, literal and clinically focused thinking about eating disorders.
Using a qualitative inquiry-based approach, we discovered that reframing eating disorders education through co-produced, creative, and humanistic methods promotes a strengths-based, trauma-informed, and recovery-focused perspective. This shift allows learners to reflect on and potentially transform their approach to care. In this presentation, we will showcase “Shannon’s workshop” to illustrate how co-produced education can be effectively incorporated into the pre-registration nursing curriculum.