The Personal and Societal Parts of Healing from an Eating Disorder

In recent posts, I reflected on some of the larger social forces that have both led to the incidence of eating disorders in recent decades and impacted how these disorders are diagnosed and treated. Reckoning with the meaning of eating disorders in our society is essential, yet clinicians still need to address the symptoms of an eating disorder when someone comes to treatment for help.

First steps include assessment of the severity of the symptoms and education about hunger/fullness, metabolism and the need for energy and nutrition for overall health. Initial sessions then can focus on the means to change disorder eating patterns. No matter the larger picture, individual treatment needs to start in the same place.

However initial treatment stabilizes eating for many people, this step does not have to mean “full recovery,” the overarching promise of many programs that an eating disorder can disappear for everyone (and if it doesn’t then it’s your fault). Instead, stable eating means that someone eats enough and with enough variety to be healthy enough to move forward with their lives.

Often, treatment at this point searches for an underlying cause for the eating disorder thus implying that something external and concrete caused the problem . That is not commonly the case. The search is fruitless and not directed at the central issue.

Recent posts point out another possibility for the eating disorder in the first place. Eating behaviors or weight may instead be a means of expression, a way to say something powerful that otherwise won’t be heard. The message hidden behind the eating disorder often come from a source of emotional pain but may also be a way for others around them to understand the nature of their circumstances and the limitations they feel to move forward in their lives.

Examples can include family dynamics that scapegoat the child in the family to feel responsible for everyone’s ills or dynamics that necessitate the child care for a parent unable to take on their personal responsibility. Another possibility is a child forced to grapple with the wrath of a parent aimed at them which limits the child’s ability to focus on their own growth and development. A third may be a family with a disabled child and the sibling with an eating disorder has no room to be themselves.

There are myriad examples of scenarios where the child, much more often a daughter, finds themselves without a voice, bearing family responsibility and with an eating disorder as the only way for others to see their emotional and personal struggles.

Treatment at this point focuses on finding one’s own voice and thoughts and the means to identify, experience and express their internal world to chart a path towards living a full life. The broader social forces are at play in these individual instances, but the treatment is aimed at the person’s specific situation and finding ways for her to not feel so trapped by personal pressures. Understanding the larger implications may be helpful in the moment and helps educate the therapist to know how to proceed focusing on life change and not just food and weight.

Toggling between the larger causes of eating disorders and the individual’s need to get better is the primary experience for any eating disorder clinician. These illnesses aren’t just about food and weight, nor are they just about the social causes. They are about the combination of nuanced clinical care and understanding the root cause of eating disorders in our society.

The Return of Idealizing Thinness at All Costs

I have written extensively about the GLP-1 medications over the last couple of years because of the impact on people with eating disorders. Posts have ranged from concern about this new powerful class of medication, the ease with which people can attain them basically unsupervised, the potential benefits to some people with eating disorders and the haphazard regulation of the use of this new medical intervention.

The most significant effect of the widespread use of the GLP-1’s is the societal shift over the last few years about body and weight, especially for women. In light of the last few posts in this blog, I feel compelled to discuss the changes.

Prior to the explosion of Ozempic use, there had been a movement towards body acceptance, also called body positivity. Despite the many complicated factors about this movement, one effect for many women was the possibility of seeing their bodies, and often themselves, in a new and less critical light.

I found that body positivity enabled treatment to be more successful for many of these women with more progress than I had seen before. Instead of the constant battle upstream against the current of idealizing thinness, some women could visualize a body that did not fit the societal ideal but instead matched who they were physically as a person. The newfound freedom to see herself more clearly allowed for personal growth as well.

Ozempic and the like pushed even the most conservative women about medication to consider and often try the new drugs. Without any medical indications for use, women can easily find ways to procure them for the sole purpose of weight loss. Even though many people can’t tolerate the drugs, enough women now are in much smaller bodies and the societal pressure to be thin has rebounded very powerfully headlined by the message that weight loss is attainable for all.

Women finally seeing the possibility of settling into a place of acceptance and even comfort with their bodies now suffer with negative thoughts about their bodies and themselves again. The end of any semblance of body positivity renewed the onslaught of women’s body hatred.

I don’t think these new medications are intended for social ills. The benefit for diabetes, metabolic disorders and some eating disorders is profound. The pharmaceutical industry, however, is a for profit business so the pressure to take as much of the financial pie always wins over thoughtful and regulated use of powerful new drugs.

Patients and clinicians alike need to face the reinvigorated desire for thinness by doubling down on work aimed at giving women freedom and direction. Life needs to mean more than the number on a scale or meeting the societal norm at all costs. GLP-1’s or not, these goals can’t change. External factors will come and go. The overvaluing of body won’t stop being a way to disempower women any time soon, but treatment needs to see the barriers and continue to move forward.

Why are Men Treated Differently for an Eating Disorder (and What It Means)?

The eating disorder field purports that an eating disorder diagnosis is much more common in women than men. The fact that the original diagnosis included skipped periods reveals that the diagnosis was created solely with women in mind and wasn’t very open to men having these disorders in the first place.

Early on my practice, I often would see men, young and old, for an initial appointment to discuss eating disorder symptoms only for them to never to return. The shame of admitting to the symptoms of what was deemed a women’s disorder was too strong to overcome. This fact may have changed to some degree, but the underlying belief that only women have eating disorders is intact.

Various media outlets, but especially social media, have made it increasingly clear that many men have eating disorders of all kinds. Just as with women, men experience symptoms which range from restricting food, obsession with low weights, binging and purging and excessive exercise. In fact, there is no discernible difference.

The only question is why eating disorders are still largely considered to be for women and why the treatment industry focuses almost exclusively on women.

The first component is that societal focus on body and weight remains much more interested in women’s bodies. Starting with the magazine industry prizing of thinness for women in the 1960’s, media continues to encourage women to base identity and success on their bodies. Some men feel the impulse to perfect their bodies and control food, but society bases a man’s success on many other things than body and weight.

Second, the coupling of life success and body image for women creates a dynamic that routinely disempowers even the most successful women. No matter how much women accomplish, they are burdened by the sense of failure and loathing about their bodies, encouraged to nitpick and drown in disgust at their physical selves. Men aren’t typically hampered by these external demands in the same way.

Third, the treatment industry and programs know that families will scapegoat and hospitalize their daughters much more easily than their sons. Societal pressures on families still values the expectations for success of sons over daughters, no matter how far feminism has changed our norms.

Financial firms which have bought and multiplied treatment facilities to amass insurance money know the profit lies with the treatment of women, who are much more likely to comply with enforced programs, repeat admissions and longterm care.

The next obvious question is why aren’t men with the same symptoms treated the same way?

This question reveals much less about actually clinical knowledge and research and much more about societal prejudice. Mental health treatment acts to disempower women now as it has for decades. The progression of illnesses created to reflect and enforce societal bias is ongoing for decades: hysteria, borderline personality disorder and now eating disorders span almost a century of psychiatric diagnoses.

These medical labels isolate and scapegoat a group of women and use clinical medicine to support the social order. That social order also includes the organizing principle that men are in power, even if they have what we call eating disorder symptoms.

Women in treatment programs need to be heard, not sequestered away. They need to be given a chance to grow and experience life, not languish in wards and centers meant to render them silent and impotent. They need to stop being seen as an impediment to our society and to be given a shot at life.

The treatment programs don’t work. All clinicians in the field know the success rate is low, but we have all been brainwashed into thinking it’s the only way to treat these patients, the large majority of them being women. Instead, we need to stand up and speak the truth so women who are scapegoated and isolated from the world get their due.

The Disgrace of Eating Disorder Treatment Programs

The last post attempted to distinguish between eating disorders and the deleterious and often traumatic effect of treatment. Clinicians often approach them as one issue, but time working with patients shows how different these two issues are.

The best place to start is to compare people with a longstanding eating disorder who have spent years in treatment to those who have not. With the explosion of private equity-funded programs, it’s harder to find people without any experience in treatment, but they do exist.

Those new to treatment have a much clearer path towards wellness. They need to be heard and to be understood as I explained in the last post. They need information about their eating patterns and how and why they have responded to food restriction over the years. They need guidance as to why this started and how to change it, if they want to. Last, they need to understand how their eating patterns are limiting and how to find what they want in life.

On the contrary, people who have spent years in programs have left behind all the original parts of their eating disorder. They are angry for having been locked up in programs, for having been treated like a child, for having been treated like a criminal, for being blamed for a problem as if an eating disorder is willful disobedience.

They are frequently obsessed with weight and calories because programs focus primarily on these factors. They want to manipulate their food to fight back against the system that has hijacked their lives for their own supposed good. They have lost hope on finding what they want in life and have internalized the idea that they are broken and have nothing left.

Treatment programs run by for profit financial companies intending to grow and sell a brand have little interest in healing anyone. Hospitals organized around the philosophy that eating disorders are a blemish on our society and need to be stamped out justify ostracizing an entire segment of people. Vilification of eating disorders pervades the broader social media world and allows people to blame this population for our own misguided obsession with food and weight.

Eating disorder treatment needs to focus on the individual first and foremost. These people, still mostly but not all women, feel unheard and unseen. In a culture that continues to idealize thinness, marginalized people fall into food restriction to seek out praise and attention. As I have written in this blog many times, the number one risk factor for an eating disorder is dieting. Many of the people looking for positive feedback by restricting food end up with an eating disorder and landing in punitive treatment.

Eating disorders are a cry for help from an isolated part of our society. We treat these people as the hysterics were treated years ago: blamed for their problems, locked up for their own good and punished until they give up any hope.

I feel so angry and powerless to make change despite treating this group of people for over two decades. I’m not sure what, but something needs to change.

Eating Disorder are About Not Being Heard

Eating disorder treatment is split between an academic and clinical focus. Research tends to look at assessment tools and perfecting diagnosis. The clinical treatment field is overwhelmed by the capitalist drive to turn a profit using health insurance payments. Individual outpatient treatment increasingly rests on virtual practices with clinicians limited in knowledge to treat people with eating disorders. The result is a wide ranging, disparate and unfocused way to help people looking for support and guidance.

Nowhere in this landscape is there a focus on the psychological and physical wellness of people seeking help.

People don’t get well using the criteria currently in vogue for assessment. So much of the focus is still on weight, daily judgment of food intake and regular threats of “higher level of care” when clinicians feel overwhelmed or frightened of a patient who doesn’t get better in a timely fashion.

People with eating disorders, for the most part, don’t feel heard or acknowledged in our society. They feel isolated and ostracized. They know they either need to fit into the box determined by external forces or be left on the sidelines.

The eating disorder, in one form or another, serves the purpose of getting the attention of those around them either by changes in their body or in their behavior. As much as treatment may be misguided and unwarranted, acknowledgement of the eating disorder expresses one’s displeasure and anger about the world in which they are trapped.

What is critical to note is that each individual does not choose this path. No one says they want to protest so they develop an eating disorder. Almost everyone falls into the eating patterns as a reaction to circumstances, experiences a beneficial physiological and/or psychological benefit and subsequently finds that they are trapped in the cycle.

Society is obsessed with thinness, so restricting food is encouraged in all communities, and these new eating patterns provide a form of expression that is otherwise ignored. Clinical research will show the genetic predisposition to eating disorders or the risk factors, but these data are not contradictory to the societal meaning eating disorders have in our world.

Attention to the individual person and their thoughts, feelings and desires can create a path for a meaningful life not lived solely through eating and weight. Similarly, opting for treatment which explicitly values the individual over food and weight will open a humane path for life to change and create a way for the person to learn to trust herself at the core.

Time and again, patients tell me that my belief in them and willingness to see them as an individual, no matter their eating patterns or weight, created the possibility for change. Ultimately, understanding people with eating disorders means understanding them fully. They are people suffering who only need someone willing to listen.

Body Image: A Symbol of Eating Disorder Treatment Gone Awry

One place to start addressing the effect of eating disorder treatment is the idea of body image. The inception of eating disorder diagnoses began with the cultural preference for thinness spread through mass media in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Classification and treatment incorporated the concept of body image as the bedrock of recovery.

Body image distortion conflated with body dysmorphia are now considered a hallmark for any eating disorder. The novel idea at the time that a person might not see their body as others do, or may in fact see a very different body, consumed the clinical eating disorder treatment world, but without nuance or creativity. It might have been helpful to consider how and why people struggled with self-image but wholly another to use body image as a way to disempower and confuse a cohort of young women.

Rather than see body image in a broader schema, treatment philosophy took the psychological experience at face value. Therapy attempted to force the person to renounce how they see themselves. Behavioral work encouraged people to do exposures to face what others considered the reality of their bodies. Therapists told people with eating disorders that they had distorted thinking about themselves and their bodies and did not truly know themselves.

However, cultural norms widely contradicted the messages from therapists. How could society value and reward thinness while treatment philosophy said the exact opposite? How could therapists seem focused on thinness themselves in their own bodies while simultaneously encouraging the people they treated to ignore the larger world completely?

The conceit of the eating disorder treatment field is to make the patient themselves feel confused if not crazy while ignoring the realities around them. In this context, eating disorder treatment appears to be almost conspiratorial, certainly not therapeutic. In no way can it be helpful to tell people not to trust themselves and learn who they are.

In this vein, the concept of body image distortion starts to have more nefarious connotations. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the mixed messages about body that women endure are intended to gaslight all women. Why should women gathering the power and momentum in all parts of our society be handicapped by the confusion around body image?

Inevitably, a substantial percentage of women succumb to these beliefs and are taken away from their own lives by years of treatment. The constant concern women feel about their own bodies reinforces the pernicious norms of self-blame and self-doubt.

I’m not sure where to take these ideas about body image in the larger scope of treating people with eating disorders. Some elements of treatment need to stand including helping people be nourished enough to live and not lose so much mental energy around food and body. I don’t believe women need guidance about how to see themselves or how to live. They certainly don’t need anyone telling them they cannot even see themselves clearly.

Anyone with an eating disorder needs help to find the path to be themselves and live the life they want. Too much attention on food, weight and body image distracts from the real issue, one that’s all too present in today’s culture: the subjugation of women through their bodies.

The Exploitation of our Youth through the Eating Disorder Diagnosis, Part I

The combination of the expansion of treatment programs and the effects of social media altered the meaning of having an eating disorder in our society.

These disorders first arose as a means for clinicians to understand the soaring rate of eating-related psychiatric symptoms starting in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Doctors scrambled to find ways to understand and treat people showing up in offices and at hospitals with often severe symptoms.

At first, treatment focused on hospitalization and stabilization of food intake and healing of medical symptoms. However, the lack of comprehension of how these disorders started led to an almost universal prejudice against these patients as entitled and often even feigning symptoms for attention. It was unfathomable that people would either not eat or binge and vomit unless it was volitional.

Over time, residential treatment programs, typically run by people who went through eating disorder treatment when they were younger, developed a feminist understanding to help young women find their own identity and direction in life. The philosophy was that young women were unable to find a voice in the world without action. Treatment focused on guiding women to find themselves in other ways with much more compassion and much greater success.

For a brief moment, treatment seemed like it might focus on the the real issue plaguing mostly young women seeking support and provide a community that would listen to them and validate their experiences.

The explosion of treatment centers funded by private equity ended the brief window of humane treatment and now cycles young people, women and more men, through therapy mills run by largely inexperienced clinicians and focused on reaping the reward of health insurance money.

Gone are the days of helping young people find their path in life. Instead, programs often admit people who don’t need inpatient care, cause trauma through harsh, ignorant treatment and only harden the need to find solace in other ways, largely through the eating disorder. Some programs may do good work at times, but the overall harm does not merit the few good experiences.

Social media is rife with people excoriating treatment programs and languishing behind the label of an eating disorder. These people feel blamed for their experiences, unable to find support for who they are and lost in a sea of societal scorn for their own true struggles. Ultimately, they are unable to find themselves or even find a place in the world to figure out who they are.

The deeper question is how did the eating disorder diagnosis and treatment become another means to satisfy capitalist greed? Where is the kindness and compassion for young people, still much more often young women, who are trapped in the chains of a destructive moniker? How does the eating disorder treatment field recover?

I’ll address these questions in the coming posts.