Bobby Lerz put his 16-year-old daughter on a plane in New York so she could check into an eating-disorder clinic in Missouri. As a little girl, Elizabeth was “vivacious, gregarious, everybody’s best friend,” he tells me. But she struggled as a teenager. She was cutting classes, and Bobby observed her engaging in what seemed to be restrictive behaviors around food, sometimes using meals as bargaining chips: I’ll eat this if I get that.

One day, Elizabeth brought home a brochure from the Castlewood Treatment Center. It looked like a luxury retreat: a modernist residential facility perched in the bluffs overlooking the Meramec River outside St. Louis. She begged to go, Bobby says, and, in 2011, he and her mother agreed. “When your daughter tells you she might have an eating disorder, your h

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