The history of mental illness is inextricably linked to cultural norms of the time. The symptoms of any specific disorder don’t change and have existed as long as we know about the illness. The understanding, interpretation and pathology attributed to those symptoms change with the times.
Eating disorder symptoms are first documented centuries ago, often related to religious-based fasts and asceticism. The existence of anorexia specifically as a reaction to prolonged, forced food restriction is a genetic adaptation that appears to be a reaction to famine.
Cultural understanding and norms shifted the coining of eating disorder diagnoses in the 1960’s and has grown in our social conscience in the subsequent decades with the skyrocketing incidence of eating disorders. Social movements such as pro-Ana or body positivity combined with the expanding treatment industry represent cultural manifestations of eating disorders in our culture.
In recent years, eating disorders captivated the imagination of many subcultures, largely in the western world, and spread quickly through media and then social media. For instance, the apotheosis of thinness idealizes anorexia as an aspirational goal or, at levels of extreme emaciation, demonizes anorexia as a horrifying sideshow. None of these interpretations represent the personal experience of the illness.
All of these reactions to bodies may have some superficial meaning but are also at times a shameful collective experience of appropriating women’s bodies. During the initial rise in eating disorders, treatment took a clear feminist bent and recognized that eating disorders were the latest cultural phenomenon intended to subjugate women as they gained authority. No woman could be as potent when battling their daily lives at the same time as they confronted the endless fight against negative body image.
Once disordered eating, and the eating disorders which ensued for many, leapt from a new epidemic sweeping our world into a mainstream way of coping with the daily stress of living, the treatment industry capitalized on potential financial gain and created a money-making machine cynically based on greed and not the more worthy cause of helping people heal from mental illness.
What is so striking about eating disorders more than many mental disorders is the fundamental connection between cultural norms and the understanding of these illnesses.
Recovery is firmly rooted in identity, culture and politics. Normalizing eating patterns and the return to a healthy body ensures physical health, but true recovery always demands looking deeply inward. Shirking off the need for eating behaviors to define oneself means learning a new way to see identity, find self-worth and indeed create some sort of meaning to daily life. Treatment has as much in common with the philosophical pursuit of being human as it does with psychotherapy.
The overwhelming social media about eating disorders sometimes miss the point of getting better. The idea is not to join an eating disorder community that establishes identity through the illness. On the contrary, meaning grows from escaping the tyranny of body and food.
I have no trouble seeing how these disorders serve as a metaphor for our daily struggles to be human. Sometimes I wish we could see how eating disorders become a way of silencing new voices that need to be heard. Wasting so much time and energy on food and body is never productive. That energy can be used in so many other parts of our daily lives. Recovery almost always means valuing self and relationships to learn how to live better lives and be better people.
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