wrote her sixth-grade research paper on eating disorders. She knew the dangers. She would never choose to have anorexia. She was safe.

I was wrong about many things, but I was right about that one thing: Kitty didn’t choose anorexia. Anorexia chose her. And it nearly killed her.

At Kitty’s lowest weight, her heart beat dangerously slowly; it could have stopped at any time. Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications, and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recover in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.

Kitty didn’t choose anorexia. No one chooses anorexia, or bulimia, or any other eating disorder. Intelligence is no protection; many of the young women (and, increasingly, men) who develop anorexia are bright and curious and tuned in. Families are no protection, either, because anorexia strikes children from happy families and difficult ones, repressed families and families who talk ad nauseam about feelings. The families of anorexics do share certain traits, though: a history of eating disorders, or anxiety, or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or all of the above.

I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the bony chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been my daughter. It wasn’t. It’s not. If I have anything to say about it, it won’t be.

This is our family’s story. Kitty was diagnosed with anorexia in June 2005. In August of that year we began family-based treatment (FBT), also known as the Maudsley approach, to help her recover. That was the start of the hardest year of all of our lives. That year, I learned just how brave my daughter is. Five or six times a day, she sat at the table and faced down panic and guilt, terror and delusions and physical pain, and kept going. And she emerged on the other side. After months of being lost, she came back to us and to herself, and the world took on color and sound and meaning once more.

Between 3 and 6 percent of all teens deal with an eating disorder, whether it’s anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, or the all-too-common ED-NOS, or eating disorder not specified. Many more struggle with other devastating illnesses, both mental and physical: Schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder. Depression and anxiety. Autism. Cystic fibrosis. Cerebral palsy. Autoimmune disorders.

We have a long history, in this country and elsewhere in the Western world, of implicating families in their children’s illnesses. As I write, the Academy for Eating Disorders has released a position paper—two years in the making—that acknowledges, among other things, that “family factors” may play some role in both causing and sustaining an eating disorder. But it goes on to say, “Current knowledge refutes the idea that [families] are either the exclusive or even the primary mechanisms that underlie risk. Thus, the AED stands firmly against any etiologic model of eating disorders in which family influences are seen as the primary cause of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, and condemns generalizing statements that imply families are to blame for their child’s illness.”

The AED’s paper takes a step in the right direction—one that’s already been taken when it comes to illnesses like schizophrenia and autism, where the biological underpinnings and mechanisms of the diseases are more widely accepted. We’ll get there for eating disorders, too; it’s just going to take awhile.

One of the hopeful signs is the slow rise of family-based treatment, which aligns parents with the teenager rather than separating them, as has been the norm. This sea change is not specific to eating disorders, but it’s particularly encouraging in that context because of the hundred-plus-year history of blaming parents for anorexia and bulimia. As I write, the Children’s Hospital in Westmead, Australia, has just opened two family units, so parents and siblings can stay at the hospital with a child undergoing treatment