The Place of Eating Disorders in the History of Psychiatric Illnesses

Psychological maladies have shifted due to cultural changes in the history of the last two centuries. The psychological and emotional struggles are consistent, but the physical symptoms associated with that stress change due to new societal norms and expectations.

There have been various symptoms over these years as a result of stress and anxiety: fainting spells, prolonged periods of weakness, “hysteria,” mental breakdowns, self-harm and now eating disorders.

The sharp rise in the incidence of eating disorders in the most recent decades reflects the transition of psychological symptoms in the climate of diet culture. The extreme focus on thinness encouraged young people to diet in order to manage their emotional struggles, and dieting is the number one risk factor for developing an eating disorder.

Like all of the manifestations of emotional issues, addressing the physical issue will uncover the psychological ones. However, eating disorders are different.

For the other issues, working on the emotional piece can eliminate the physical symptom almost immediately. For eating disorders, the fundamental change in eating disorder behaviors doesn’t change so easily.

The disordered way of eating is often ingrained quickly for people with eating disorders as a way of coping through the numbing effect of the symptoms and the powerful, unconscious eating routines that can be comforting.

Once the mind and body adjust to a new way of eating, even a disordered one, it takes an enormous amount of work to make a new eating pattern stick. As the person finds new ways to cope emotionally with the struggle that led them to the eating disorder itself, they also need to relearn how to eat. The process of figuring out how to eat can take a long time and a lot of effort.

The epidemic of eating disorders stems from the transition of emotional struggles to the newest cultural phenomenon: diet culture. As it turns out, reversing eating disorder symptoms take a lot more time and effort than reversing other physical manifestation of other psychological problems in past generations.