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.