Differences Among Purging Presentations at Admission to Treatment: Eating Disorder and General Psychopathology Symptoms.

One third of eating disorder (ED) cases onset during emerging adulthood that is, 18 to 25 years (Solmi et al. ), making this a pertinent developmental window for early intervention. If this coincides with transition to university, vulnerability to disordered eating may be further amplified, given increased stress, greater autonomy, disrupted routines, and heightened exposure to performance‐based pressures (Harrer et al. ). Many young people do not access appropriate care due to lack of appropriate, accessible and affordable services (Kazdin et al. ), barriers that are particularly pronounced in disordered eating (Ali et al. ). Minimisation of symptoms (Radunz et al. ), high levels of comorbidity (Udo and Grilo ), and reluctance to adopt diagnostic labels can further impede help‐seeking, requiring scalable, transdiagnostic early intervention that can more broadly engage individuals with emerging symptoms who may not identify with disorder‐specific approaches. Transdiagnostic considerations are becoming increasingly important, given interest in using diet and exercise as interventions for depression and anxiety (Firth et al. ), which may trigger disordered eating. App‐based digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) offer scalable early support while reducing barriers related to cost, time, and limited‐service availability (Bohrer et al. ; Fitzsimmons‐Craft et al. ; Karekla et al. ). These low‐intensity self‐help interventions can significantly reduce ED symptoms as well as depression, anxiety, distress, and improve self‐esteem (Linardon et al. ). A key challenge for DMHIs is maintaining engagement, with a pooled mean of 42% adherence for disordered eating (Liu, Anderson, et al. ) compared to 62% for depression and anxiety (Liu, Torous, et al. ), limiting real‐world effectiveness. Existing DMHIs for university students (Bohrer et al. ; Fitzsimmons‐Craft et al. ) typically rely on sustained engagement over multiple sessions, which may be poorly aligned with university populations characterized by fluctuating motivation and competing demands. The brevity and accessibility of single‐session interventions (SSIs; Schleider et al. ) may achieve better alignment with the needs and help‐seeking patterns of university students with disordered eating, where students show variable willingness to commit to longer programs (Abel et al. ; Kazdin et al. ). SSIs can reduce reliance on sustained engagement while still delivering meaningful therapeutic content in a single, low‐burden session. Initial but limited evidence on ED‐focused SSIs indicates small but significant improvements in symptoms and broader mental health outcomes, particularly when in a self‐guided digital format (Negi et al. ; Schleider et al. ; Zhou et al. ).