Why are People with Eating Disorders Blamed for their Illness

Another component of eating disorders that differentiates them from other mental illnesses is blame. More than every other psychiatric problem, people with eating disorders are routinely blamed for their illness and their inability to get well.

Not just family and friends but even clinicians often tell the person to just eat a sandwich or drink a milkshake. The lack of compassion and limited inclination for people to even try to understand eating disorders are so powerful that it’s hard not to look for other reasons to explain hard-hearted responses.

Eating disorders are contradictory for most people. Eating is a basic component of living, not far behind breathing and sleeping. It’s anathema for people to conceive of a world in which they willfully don’t eat or purge food in some way. The instinct to tell someone just eat a sandwich comes in part from the incredulity that a person would do otherwise.

However, that reaction makes sense the first few times a person tries to understand an eating disorder. Why would family and friends continue to say the same thing months and years later? How can experienced clinicians repeat the same mantra to eating disorder patients?

Another part of the confusion is the dearth of successful treatment. Medications, by and large, are ineffective. Therapies are specialized and take a long time to have a significant impact. Moreover, not enough clinicians are experienced in treating people with eating disorders even though many people profess to have that expertise.

The decades of social pressure to be thin and diet has glamorized eating disorders. On the one hand, many people in general see an eating disorder as a prolonged successful diet. Few understand the psychological torture of the illness. On the other hand, the cultural zeitgeist professes that once someone has an eating disorder, they always will. It’s a life sentence. The concept of full recovery is one most people have never contemplated or even heard about.

All of these aspects of eating disorders leave the public with the sense that eating disorders are the person’s fault. The final blow in this scenario is that the blame ultimately disempowers the person, usually a woman, from feeling like she has any ability to get better. Since recovery involves a constant, daily fight against the disorder while attempting to tolerate the discomfort of changing an automatic behavior pattern, the blame undermines a chance at getting well.

It behooves family, friends and clinicians to scrap the assumption of blame. Eating disorders are true illnesses. The sufferers need and deserve support, comfort and compassion.