This is exactly the type of body dysmorphia that is being ‘treated’ with puberty hormones and sex re-assignment surgery for a different generation.
With such a strongly negative, and possibly mortal psychology at play, it is highly irresponsible of therapists and paediatricians to collude with surgeons and family insurance schemes, since this is happening predominantly in the US. Some, of course, will be thinking mostly about the money.
Thank you for sharing these profoundly moving thoughts and experiences. My heart aches for people who have body dysmorphia. At least there is a recognition that anorexia IS a mental illness. Sadly, so many children with a different type of body dysmorphia – gender dysmorphia – get no help at all. In fact they are encouraged in their delusion and confusion. They are given life-changing hormones and operations. There is an appalling rate of suicidal ideation amongst detransitioners who want to change their minds and reverse the sex change operation but can’t. I used to say, “Can you imagine if we validated anorexia sufferers in the same way? If we told them they were allowed to identify as a person who’s too fat and won’t eat because that was their lived experience…” Now I know that this is the new “pathway”, I’m horrified. The one treatment you didn’t mention is somatic healing. Championed by people like Peter Devine and Bessel van der Kolk, and Gabor Mate, it’s a therapy that releases trapped trauma in the body, which is often the root of psychological issues that play out physically. They’ve had a lot of success with anorexics and addicts. But more than anything, it is the spiritual vacuum modern society inhabits that leads to so much disease. Telling people they have a “terminal” illness is simply wicked.
it is the spiritual vacuum modern society inhabits that leads to so much disease.
Excellent observation and whilst not the exclusive driver I suspect has a significant and detrimental impact.Which of course implies that a “spiritual recovery” might have a part to play in getting well.
I am not a self-described spiritual or religious person at all, although I certainly believe that we are not just animated biological machines. I don’t care what we call this immaterial component: energy, essence, soul, etc.
One’s state of mind certainly plays a role in physical recovery, but a terminal illness is called terminal for a reason! When the body’s biological functions cannot be maintained, it’s over and any fight is futile. I saw this first-hand when my husband’s father’s wife was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal cancer. Both she and her husband refused to accept the diagnosis, but this refusal changed nothing. She died four months later having undergone painful and ultimately unnecessary treatments. I am not condemning them for the decisions they made, but I question the wisdom.
Earlier this year, I lost my beloved dog to cancer. He and I fought a fierce battle, as the tumour appeared very treatable, but ultimately I had to accept that we could not win. Jack was euthanised at home, surrounded by family and friends. He had a dignified death. I know that Jack and our other dog Louie intuitively understood that his life was nearing the end. Louie grieved and mourned for many months, but he accepted it. The experience has taught me more compassion and humility. Death is a natural part of life, as are the pain and sorrow of loss. The acceptance shown by my dogs had a purity and simplicity that is rare amongst people; it didn’t diminish the significance nor the consequences for those who are left behind. Perhaps that is true spirituality.
I mostly agree with your comments, but I vehemently disagree that telling people they have a terminal illness is wicked. Why is that? I am not referring to the case described in the article, but end-stage, or terminal, illness in general. It exists, it’s a fact, and it’s the reason we have hospices and palliative care. I find it far more detrimental and counterproductive to give patients and their families false and unfounded hope than to help everybody accept that life is finite and to give people a chance to say goodbye. Death is unavoidable, and I believe that some forms of death are more dignified than others. Our spiritual forefathers accepted death, and had rituals in place to prepare for it. In today’s society we pretend that death doesn’t exist; we minimise and ignore its inevitability. If that’s what you mean by spiritual vacuum, I concur, but disease and illness have always been a part of life, and much more so in the past than today.
Arkadian X
7 months ago
Very touching article, thanks.
A couple of editorial points: as I pointed out in her previous articles on trans issues, the author studiously avoids the use of pronouns in those cases, while here she introduces them in line 2 without issue.
Also, at the end of the article she says that
“… many of the triggers of bodily alienation are more obvious than ever before”, one of which is “sexualised bodies represent[ing] inner identities”. I had to reread that passage more than once to realise she was talking about “gender affirming care”.
Why is the author tiptoeing around what many consider the “new” anorexia as social contagion?
Mangle Tangle
7 months ago
Don’t be too hard on yourself about how you treated L – you were only 19 then. Very good article, thanks. It gave me such an insight into the difference between our modern age and of societies before now, in terms of girls and how the more vulnerable among them (vulnerable genetically, perhaps, or because of their family situation) are not protected any longer from the harmful effects of sexual objection. The media, the porn industry and unbelievable amounts of peer to peer communication and influence are to blame. But ultimately there must be a biological solution to the illness. These social factors hack the brain in a biological way, and there has to be a way of treating that.
What a brilliant and wise article. I retired as a mental health clinician a while ago, so I know nothing about the new NHS guidelines, but I welcome them.
I have seen impatient and controlling treatment by professionals. Sometimes it’s a kind of God complex, more often it’s the stresses of having to do an impossible job, to try and keep someone alive when maybe their settled wish is to die, or maybe its not: and that’s a difficult place for staff to be.
I’ve had many conversations with people with this diagnosis, and I know there can be an impenetrability to how they can present that feels like psychosis, but not the usual kind. Sometimes, if we got too close to whatever felt like the core of what ailed them, they would choose to stop talking rather than go there.
The person themselves can’t put what ails them into words, the clinician can’t find a way in, so we are thrown back on physical stuff, calory counting, force feeding, and behavioural stuff, rewards and penalties, as if the person is a pet to be trained. We end up here because we can’t do nothing and watch the person starve to death, and we don’t know what else to do.
Standing back and allowing someone to die cuts across the instincts and ethics of mental health professionals, but perhaps in the case of terminal anorexia it may be necessary, but its hard, and staff need help with this too. We need to be reassured that we’re not terrible carers and we need to know that we’re not breaking the law, or are in danger of being struck off, if we do this.
The author is wise to see terminal anorexia in such tragic terms, it is tragedy, no one to blame in any meaningful sense, just an awful thing, to be managed as compassionately and realistically as possible.
Sometimes, if we got too close to whatever felt like the core of what ailed them, they would choose to stop talking rather than go there….The person themselves can’t put what ails them into words
Your post makes me wonder about the potential of psychedelics to break through that wall. I suppose any extraordinary experience would do, but there few of those available in pill form.
We used to do this, it’s called ‘abreaction’ and can use drugs or hypnosis [or both].The general idea is that if we break down people’s defences against this stuff being brought into the light then people can integrate it into their conscious schematic thought and deal with it better. We stopped doing it using powerful drugs because of some bad outcomes [I believe] and also because of better mainstream drugs. A person must give consent to this treatment, and if they are already that resistant to stuff being brought into the light then we’re stuck, unless we do it against their wishes and that’s an ethical mine field. I think there is a use for psychedelics, but we need to go carefully, it can be fraught with danger. I’ve never seen it done.
Sure. What interests me more than the drugs as such, is the ultimate power of transformative experience, and what that might say about meaning, helplessness etc. You could potentially get such effects through non drug means, such as surviving a plane crash, or saving a life – not a practical possibility, but some sort of rosetta stone to contemplate.
There are transformative experiences [as well as destructive ones], but I guess they’re different for different people and can’t be predicted. Maybe experiences can be seen as transformative with hindsight, viewed in conjunction with other experiences. I wonder sometimes if being hospitalised and having a horrible time at the hands of unpleasant staff might by some alchemy, for some people, be seen as a transformative experience, their anger at the system energising them to climb out of whatever hole they’re in. I’m not suggesting an experiment, but who knows.
“We used to do this, it’s called ‘abreaction’ and can use drugs or hypnosis” BTW – I’m guessing your clinic wasn’t adminstering the psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, MDMA)?
I read your link with great interest. Certainly psylocybin seems to have good potential in treating intractable illnesses. She’s right in saying that people with severe anorexia can’t engage in the process of recovery, we’re all at sea, both patient and clinician, so something that breaks up the inflexible, intangible behaviour patterns would be very useful. I know that good work has been done using psylocybin with PTSD, more my line of work and arguably less perplexing than eating disorders. We still need skilled one to one work to consolidate and make sense of any psylocybin breakthrough and whatever we do, we still have the protective anxiety around anorexia to deal with. My time is done, its over to the next generation, I wish them well.
Jacqui Ford
7 months ago
“It is the spiritual vacuum modern society inhabits that leads to so much disease.” I strongly agree. Finding my identity in Christ Jesus when I was 16, gave me a firm foundation on which to build my life and I have never looked back! Knowing I am loved by Almighty God with whom I have an ongoing relationship and who provides for my needs on a daily basis, has enabled me to accept myself as I am and stay on an even keel through the difficult times. Would that those with such a hatred of their own bodies could find such love and acceptance.
It would be a brave person indeed who argued that people with strong religious faith never become anorexic.
Albert McGloan
7 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_mirabilis
One wonders how or if the Church was able to prevent women starving themselves to death. Church records indicate that male and female religious who fasted to the point of illness were castigated for their behaviour.
It would be interesting to know how many religious died from their impenitent fasting, or if faith put a brake upon these strange impulses.
UnHerd Reader
7 months ago
Dr. Dee Dawson, the psychiatrist who founded the Rhodes Farm eating disorder clinic for children and adolescents in North London told me in 1999 that one third of her patients were young boys.
She also said that no amount of therapy would do her patients the slightest bit of good if they were permitted to starve themselves to death whilst in her care, and therefore her efforts were always focused on getting her patients to eat. Many had deep-seated issues and these would take a lot of time to resolve, meanwhile they were likely to kill themselves without intervention.
Last edited 7 months ago by UnHerd Reader
Clare Knight
7 months ago
When I was 12 years old I became unable to eat. I wanted to but couldn’t. My mother consulted a doctor and he gave her, what I presume, were some kind of tranquilizers, and I gradually became able to eat. In hindsight I think it was hormone related, pubescent anxiety. It wasn’t body dysmorphia, but I wonder if it hadn’t been dealt with at the time if it might not have become something more entrenched.
Malcolm Knott
7 months ago
All very puzzling. But let’s leave aside the wider philosophical questions about the nature of society, etc. etc. and simply ask, which treatments, if any, are successful and which are not?
‘I know that a third option, helping them to live, is not always possible.’
I think this is a crucial argument within the article, but it needs unpacking a little. Medicine is only ever as good as the best we can do at the time. Our approach to anorexia today is very much better than it was 30 years ago, and there is no reason to believe that it won’t go on getting better in the future. In the meantime, this disturbing grey area, in which some sufferers are apparently beyond help, is likely to be a primary source of the advancements in the treatment of anorexia we will make in the future. As the author says, ‘There has to be a middle ground, whereby showing compassion does not require us to abandon the principle that no one should be dying of anorexia at all.’
Brian Villanueva
7 months ago
Severe anorexics are similar to long-term drug addicts. Both are behavior conditions which have very poor long-term outcomes. Treatment for each follows the same options: medical embrace and management (needle exchanges for addicts, palliative care for anorexics), or forced rehab (inpatient drug treatment for addicts and institutionalization and forced calorie intake for anorexics).
Since our guiding philosophy is “maximal individual autonomy”, I suspect we will take the former path in both cases.
jane baker
7 months ago
Tiresome middle and upper class people with “too much choice”,too much opportunity and Too Much Money. Go and live on a rubbish heap in the Philippines and whinge about your hard life there. No one’s listening.
It’s not a matter of either or, Jane. One can care about people who are starving through choice and also those who are starving from lack of access to food.
I’m struggling with your second sentence.
Do you mean, as I interpret it, that no one has a right to help these people? Which I don’t agree with, and find a bizarre statement (notwithstanding what “fix” actually means in any given context).
Or were you trying to say that there is no right to compelled help? Something which I would agree with.
So what do we do with actively suicidal people? Is it wrong to take them to a secure hospital or temporary cell and deny them access to things that can hurt them? Is it wrong to mandate they take medication?
There is no greater freedom in life than deciding when and how you want to die.
It is wrong to mandate anything that affects others.
Help can be offered, nothing more.
Here we go again. Though I hate the ever expanding intrusiveness and totalitarianism of the nanny state and believe we all have a right to our own vices, I can’t see my way to just letting people destroy themselves due to what is obviously severe psychological illness. I would suggest that there’s a chilling indifference to other human beings underlying your arguments.
I strongly object to the term “chilling indifference.”
It’s possible to empathise while simultaneously having firmly held principles that dictate non-interference in the lives of others, regardless of how they choose to live (or die).
Anorexia is obviously extremely self destructive and far too often fatal, but I wouldn’t equate it with a straightforward act of suicide, which you seem to be doing here. As a side note, laws against suicide are absurd and irrelevant. What’s the punishment supposed to be?
I’m sick of the mentally ill. All this prattling on about compassion and keeping the unfit alive is destroying society. Not everyone lives to adulthood who is born. Some people, due to luck or genetics, are going to be losers. They need to die quickly and without an audience. Don’t let the unfit breed.
Many want help to overcome illness. Many suicidal people later cherish the fact they are alive. You view this abject illness as a matter of choice – that’s possibly your misinterpretation. Strange considering you must have read the balanced, sensitive article about a hugely complex issue.
This is exactly the type of body dysmorphia that is being ‘treated’ with puberty hormones and sex re-assignment surgery for a different generation.
With such a strongly negative, and possibly mortal psychology at play, it is highly irresponsible of therapists and paediatricians to collude with surgeons and family insurance schemes, since this is happening predominantly in the US. Some, of course, will be thinking mostly about the money.
I don’t think it’s the same thing.
Thank you for sharing these profoundly moving thoughts and experiences. My heart aches for people who have body dysmorphia. At least there is a recognition that anorexia IS a mental illness. Sadly, so many children with a different type of body dysmorphia – gender dysmorphia – get no help at all. In fact they are encouraged in their delusion and confusion. They are given life-changing hormones and operations. There is an appalling rate of suicidal ideation amongst detransitioners who want to change their minds and reverse the sex change operation but can’t. I used to say, “Can you imagine if we validated anorexia sufferers in the same way? If we told them they were allowed to identify as a person who’s too fat and won’t eat because that was their lived experience…” Now I know that this is the new “pathway”, I’m horrified. The one treatment you didn’t mention is somatic healing. Championed by people like Peter Devine and Bessel van der Kolk, and Gabor Mate, it’s a therapy that releases trapped trauma in the body, which is often the root of psychological issues that play out physically. They’ve had a lot of success with anorexics and addicts. But more than anything, it is the spiritual vacuum modern society inhabits that leads to so much disease. Telling people they have a “terminal” illness is simply wicked.
it is the spiritual vacuum modern society inhabits that leads to so much disease.
Excellent observation and whilst not the exclusive driver I suspect has a significant and detrimental impact.Which of course implies that a “spiritual recovery” might have a part to play in getting well.
I am not a self-described spiritual or religious person at all, although I certainly believe that we are not just animated biological machines. I don’t care what we call this immaterial component: energy, essence, soul, etc.
One’s state of mind certainly plays a role in physical recovery, but a terminal illness is called terminal for a reason! When the body’s biological functions cannot be maintained, it’s over and any fight is futile. I saw this first-hand when my husband’s father’s wife was diagnosed with stage 4 terminal cancer. Both she and her husband refused to accept the diagnosis, but this refusal changed nothing. She died four months later having undergone painful and ultimately unnecessary treatments. I am not condemning them for the decisions they made, but I question the wisdom.
Earlier this year, I lost my beloved dog to cancer. He and I fought a fierce battle, as the tumour appeared very treatable, but ultimately I had to accept that we could not win. Jack was euthanised at home, surrounded by family and friends. He had a dignified death. I know that Jack and our other dog Louie intuitively understood that his life was nearing the end. Louie grieved and mourned for many months, but he accepted it. The experience has taught me more compassion and humility. Death is a natural part of life, as are the pain and sorrow of loss. The acceptance shown by my dogs had a purity and simplicity that is rare amongst people; it didn’t diminish the significance nor the consequences for those who are left behind. Perhaps that is true spirituality.
I mostly agree with your comments, but I vehemently disagree that telling people they have a terminal illness is wicked. Why is that? I am not referring to the case described in the article, but end-stage, or terminal, illness in general. It exists, it’s a fact, and it’s the reason we have hospices and palliative care. I find it far more detrimental and counterproductive to give patients and their families false and unfounded hope than to help everybody accept that life is finite and to give people a chance to say goodbye. Death is unavoidable, and I believe that some forms of death are more dignified than others. Our spiritual forefathers accepted death, and had rituals in place to prepare for it. In today’s society we pretend that death doesn’t exist; we minimise and ignore its inevitability. If that’s what you mean by spiritual vacuum, I concur, but disease and illness have always been a part of life, and much more so in the past than today.
Very touching article, thanks.
A couple of editorial points: as I pointed out in her previous articles on trans issues, the author studiously avoids the use of pronouns in those cases, while here she introduces them in line 2 without issue.
Also, at the end of the article she says that
“… many of the triggers of bodily alienation are more obvious than ever before”, one of which is “sexualised bodies represent[ing] inner identities”. I had to reread that passage more than once to realise she was talking about “gender affirming care”.
Why is the author tiptoeing around what many consider the “new” anorexia as social contagion?
Don’t be too hard on yourself about how you treated L – you were only 19 then. Very good article, thanks. It gave me such an insight into the difference between our modern age and of societies before now, in terms of girls and how the more vulnerable among them (vulnerable genetically, perhaps, or because of their family situation) are not protected any longer from the harmful effects of sexual objection. The media, the porn industry and unbelievable amounts of peer to peer communication and influence are to blame. But ultimately there must be a biological solution to the illness. These social factors hack the brain in a biological way, and there has to be a way of treating that.
Many sufferers are male. I had it for years.
Male anorexia in our family too.
I didn’t realise. Thanks.
What a brilliant and wise article. I retired as a mental health clinician a while ago, so I know nothing about the new NHS guidelines, but I welcome them.
I have seen impatient and controlling treatment by professionals. Sometimes it’s a kind of God complex, more often it’s the stresses of having to do an impossible job, to try and keep someone alive when maybe their settled wish is to die, or maybe its not: and that’s a difficult place for staff to be.
I’ve had many conversations with people with this diagnosis, and I know there can be an impenetrability to how they can present that feels like psychosis, but not the usual kind. Sometimes, if we got too close to whatever felt like the core of what ailed them, they would choose to stop talking rather than go there.
The person themselves can’t put what ails them into words, the clinician can’t find a way in, so we are thrown back on physical stuff, calory counting, force feeding, and behavioural stuff, rewards and penalties, as if the person is a pet to be trained. We end up here because we can’t do nothing and watch the person starve to death, and we don’t know what else to do.
Standing back and allowing someone to die cuts across the instincts and ethics of mental health professionals, but perhaps in the case of terminal anorexia it may be necessary, but its hard, and staff need help with this too. We need to be reassured that we’re not terrible carers and we need to know that we’re not breaking the law, or are in danger of being struck off, if we do this.
The author is wise to see terminal anorexia in such tragic terms, it is tragedy, no one to blame in any meaningful sense, just an awful thing, to be managed as compassionately and realistically as possible.
A beautifully deep post – “we can’t do nothing .. and we don’t know what else to do”.
Well said.
Sometimes, if we got too close to whatever felt like the core of what ailed them, they would choose to stop talking rather than go there….The person themselves can’t put what ails them into words
Your post makes me wonder about the potential of psychedelics to break through that wall. I suppose any extraordinary experience would do, but there few of those available in pill form.
We used to do this, it’s called ‘abreaction’ and can use drugs or hypnosis [or both].The general idea is that if we break down people’s defences against this stuff being brought into the light then people can integrate it into their conscious schematic thought and deal with it better. We stopped doing it using powerful drugs because of some bad outcomes [I believe] and also because of better mainstream drugs. A person must give consent to this treatment, and if they are already that resistant to stuff being brought into the light then we’re stuck, unless we do it against their wishes and that’s an ethical mine field. I think there is a use for psychedelics, but we need to go carefully, it can be fraught with danger. I’ve never seen it done.
Sure. What interests me more than the drugs as such, is the ultimate power of transformative experience, and what that might say about meaning, helplessness etc. You could potentially get such effects through non drug means, such as surviving a plane crash, or saving a life – not a practical possibility, but some sort of rosetta stone to contemplate.
There are transformative experiences [as well as destructive ones], but I guess they’re different for different people and can’t be predicted. Maybe experiences can be seen as transformative with hindsight, viewed in conjunction with other experiences. I wonder sometimes if being hospitalised and having a horrible time at the hands of unpleasant staff might by some alchemy, for some people, be seen as a transformative experience, their anger at the system energising them to climb out of whatever hole they’re in. I’m not suggesting an experiment, but who knows.
“We used to do this, it’s called ‘abreaction’ and can use drugs or hypnosis” BTW – I’m guessing your clinic wasn’t adminstering the psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, MDMA)?
Not my clinic, I’ve never done this, but I believe LSD has been used.
Ok. I think the psychedlics have great potential, especially with regards to the chronic cases. This gets it about right I think –
https://proto.life/2022/02/psychedelics-offer-new-route-to-recovery-from-eating-disorders/
Initial therapeutic interest in the 1960’s stalled/were kyboshed in the wake of Leary & Nixon’s excesses. Let cooler heads prevail.
I read your link with great interest. Certainly psylocybin seems to have good potential in treating intractable illnesses. She’s right in saying that people with severe anorexia can’t engage in the process of recovery, we’re all at sea, both patient and clinician, so something that breaks up the inflexible, intangible behaviour patterns would be very useful. I know that good work has been done using psylocybin with PTSD, more my line of work and arguably less perplexing than eating disorders. We still need skilled one to one work to consolidate and make sense of any psylocybin breakthrough and whatever we do, we still have the protective anxiety around anorexia to deal with. My time is done, its over to the next generation, I wish them well.
“It is the spiritual vacuum modern society inhabits that leads to so much disease.” I strongly agree. Finding my identity in Christ Jesus when I was 16, gave me a firm foundation on which to build my life and I have never looked back! Knowing I am loved by Almighty God with whom I have an ongoing relationship and who provides for my needs on a daily basis, has enabled me to accept myself as I am and stay on an even keel through the difficult times. Would that those with such a hatred of their own bodies could find such love and acceptance.
The god thing doesn’t work for everyone.
It would be a brave person indeed who argued that people with strong religious faith never become anorexic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_mirabilis
One wonders how or if the Church was able to prevent women starving themselves to death. Church records indicate that male and female religious who fasted to the point of illness were castigated for their behaviour.
So apparently castigation didn’t work either.
It would be interesting to know how many religious died from their impenitent fasting, or if faith put a brake upon these strange impulses.
Dr. Dee Dawson, the psychiatrist who founded the Rhodes Farm eating disorder clinic for children and adolescents in North London told me in 1999 that one third of her patients were young boys.
She also said that no amount of therapy would do her patients the slightest bit of good if they were permitted to starve themselves to death whilst in her care, and therefore her efforts were always focused on getting her patients to eat. Many had deep-seated issues and these would take a lot of time to resolve, meanwhile they were likely to kill themselves without intervention.
When I was 12 years old I became unable to eat. I wanted to but couldn’t. My mother consulted a doctor and he gave her, what I presume, were some kind of tranquilizers, and I gradually became able to eat. In hindsight I think it was hormone related, pubescent anxiety. It wasn’t body dysmorphia, but I wonder if it hadn’t been dealt with at the time if it might not have become something more entrenched.
All very puzzling. But let’s leave aside the wider philosophical questions about the nature of society, etc. etc. and simply ask, which treatments, if any, are successful and which are not?
Exactly and what are the stats for cure versus those who die.
‘I know that a third option, helping them to live, is not always possible.’
I think this is a crucial argument within the article, but it needs unpacking a little. Medicine is only ever as good as the best we can do at the time. Our approach to anorexia today is very much better than it was 30 years ago, and there is no reason to believe that it won’t go on getting better in the future. In the meantime, this disturbing grey area, in which some sufferers are apparently beyond help, is likely to be a primary source of the advancements in the treatment of anorexia we will make in the future. As the author says, ‘There has to be a middle ground, whereby showing compassion does not require us to abandon the principle that no one should be dying of anorexia at all.’
Severe anorexics are similar to long-term drug addicts. Both are behavior conditions which have very poor long-term outcomes. Treatment for each follows the same options: medical embrace and management (needle exchanges for addicts, palliative care for anorexics), or forced rehab (inpatient drug treatment for addicts and institutionalization and forced calorie intake for anorexics).
Since our guiding philosophy is “maximal individual autonomy”, I suspect we will take the former path in both cases.
Tiresome middle and upper class people with “too much choice”,too much opportunity and Too Much Money. Go and live on a rubbish heap in the Philippines and whinge about your hard life there. No one’s listening.
It’s not a matter of either or, Jane. One can care about people who are starving through choice and also those who are starving from lack of access to food.
I’m astounded that, despite living on a rubbish heap in the Philippines, you have access to the internet.
That rubbish heap probably has better broadband than much of the UK …
People have a right to their bodily sovereignty.
Others have no right to try to fix them.
A simplistic, unhelpful contribution.
I’m struggling with your second sentence.
Do you mean, as I interpret it, that no one has a right to help these people? Which I don’t agree with, and find a bizarre statement (notwithstanding what “fix” actually means in any given context).
Or were you trying to say that there is no right to compelled help? Something which I would agree with.
You find it “bizarre” that you shouldn’t try to interfere in someone else’s life simply because it’s not being conducted in the way you approve?
Considering that isn’t what I said when asking you a fairly simple question to clarify your point, no I do not think enforced interference is right.
We agree.
So what do we do with actively suicidal people? Is it wrong to take them to a secure hospital or temporary cell and deny them access to things that can hurt them? Is it wrong to mandate they take medication?
They should be force fed until they have attained normal body weight. After that, if they refuse therapy, put them on the street.
That’s cruel.
There is no greater freedom in life than deciding when and how you want to die.
It is wrong to mandate anything that affects others.
Help can be offered, nothing more.
Exactly.
Yes, it’s wrong to mandate they take medication. And stopping someone from dying who wants to is a whole other conversation.
Here we go again. Though I hate the ever expanding intrusiveness and totalitarianism of the nanny state and believe we all have a right to our own vices, I can’t see my way to just letting people destroy themselves due to what is obviously severe psychological illness. I would suggest that there’s a chilling indifference to other human beings underlying your arguments.
They are unfit for living. The weak must die.
That’s a disturbing comment.
I strongly object to the term “chilling indifference.”
It’s possible to empathise while simultaneously having firmly held principles that dictate non-interference in the lives of others, regardless of how they choose to live (or die).
Exactly.
Not at all. Isn’t that freedom what you would want for yourself if you no longer wanted to live?
Anorexia is obviously extremely self destructive and far too often fatal, but I wouldn’t equate it with a straightforward act of suicide, which you seem to be doing here. As a side note, laws against suicide are absurd and irrelevant. What’s the punishment supposed to be?
I’m sick of the mentally ill. All this prattling on about compassion and keeping the unfit alive is destroying society. Not everyone lives to adulthood who is born. Some people, due to luck or genetics, are going to be losers. They need to die quickly and without an audience. Don’t let the unfit breed.
How about we concentrate them in camps, where we could then administer a final solution?
Another scary comment.
Thought you would have the intelligence to recognize irony when you see it, guess not.
Not from you. I didn’t think you even knew what irony was.
When on the ropes, go with a cheap shot. At least you didn’t post, ‘Rubbish’ or ‘No it’s not’.
You’re being ironic, right?
Of course, thought the wording would have made that obvious.
Just checking
Apparently not.
Some people would rather flaunt their virtuous moral outrage than think in depth about things.
I hope that includes you.
Don’t sink to his level. There is a terrible irony here, which that he is clearly a deeply, deeply unhappy and / or unfulfilled individual.
Many want help to overcome illness. Many suicidal people later cherish the fact they are alive. You view this abject illness as a matter of choice – that’s possibly your misinterpretation. Strange considering you must have read the balanced, sensitive article about a hugely complex issue.