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August 20, 2024 - 2:30pm
According to new NHS figures, twice as many children are being diagnosed with eating disorders compared to eight years ago, with some having to wait more than a year to receive treatment.
It would be a horrific situation for any type of mental disorder. With EDs, there are reasons to view it as particularly dire. As campaigners often emphasise, early intervention is key in achieving the best outcomes for recovery. What, though, might be the impact of receiving a formal diagnosis, only to then be left waiting for months on end?
Treating an ED is complex at the best of times. This is not least because the sufferer’s own relationship to the disorder may not be especially hostile. The condition can be, if not desired, then at least considered part of one’s own identity. The tremendous increase in eating disorder awareness over the past few decades has brought disadvantages in terms of making potential sufferers — adolescent girls in particular — alert to this very particular way of expressing distress.
This is not to suggest the current surge in diagnoses is anything but “genuine” — it is. Nonetheless, as I recall from my own experience of anorexia, it is very hard to pitch “ED awareness” in a way that does not make some aspects of the disorder darkly appealing. We are, it seems, more aware than ever — but have not caught up in terms of investment, prevention or cure.
In the meantime, the effect of diagnosing an eating disorder without being able to offer treatment straight away can be devastating. On a practical level, the moment a child receives an ED diagnosis concerned adults will become extra-invested in monitoring food intake and weight, activities which — however well-meaning — can be deeply counterproductive when undertaken without professional guidance. Added to this is the pressure — as noted by campaigners such as Hope Virgo — on the sufferer to be “ill enough” (that is, thin enough) to need inpatient treatment at all.
A significant gap between diagnosis and intervention risks intensifying the course of the illness, locking the sufferer into the “sick person” role. It can also create unrealistic expectations regarding what treatment might actually involve. “I will stop doing this as soon as I get to the top of the waiting list” becomes yet another way of justifying remaining ill.
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SubscribeGood article..i agree with it entirely. It is such a strange illness and platitudes like “raising awareness” probably do act as an advertisement to express distress through it( just as auther states ). It really has to be handled delicately by good therapists on a personal level. Diagnoses without treatment is cruel also ( exactky as auther state)
Part of the problem is the constant pathologizing of basic human behavior and the therapy obsession of the culture has turned the professional psych class into priests and no one can or should do anything until the “experts” arrive with their magic solution that would cure everything. The problem is however the emperor is wearing no clothes and that most people in the psych field shouldn’t be trusted with cleaning a bathroom much less trying to fix people’s lives.
As long as we continue this asinine societal obsession with the priesthood of “experts” we will continue to find the problems getting worse and not better.
Absolutely this. Normal anxiety is now perceived a catastrophe, especially for young people. What’s that saying about weak people create hard times?
Not sure awareness ‘glamourises’ disorders , but the way in which it is achieved can certainly increase a feeling that disorders are ordinary. Of course they are not, but merely suggesting this is enough to turn a sufferer into a victim of societal stigma and abuse. We need to be far more honest about what is the norm so that we can treat whatever abnormal conditions are identified as being damaging to the individual. That doesn’t mean labelling people as oddities.
Surely that saves money on food. Not a problem in my opinion. Don’t want to eat. Don’t eat. Simple as that.
Well look at what modern “treatment” has done for another dysmorphia….
Idk if it quite glamorises EDs and there’s *something* to be said for normalising as in “it’s an unhealthy thing many people do to express distress, but not this hidden, and deeply shameful thing” — but there’s certainly a dark glamorising on the edges of the specific (rarer and more deadly by far) ED of anorexia, just as there is (much more so) around drug addiction (while bulimia and alcoholism carry significantly less cachet).
But glamorised or not, “raising awareness” exposes people to a behavioural pattern they might not come across otherwise. Add a certain fashion to this (good analogy with sex/gender dysphoria nowadays) and it’s hard to see whether it’s not more destructive than helpful.
It is staggering, excuse the pun, as to how many fat and obsese people one sees in ‘ nu britn’, not least gorging themselves in pubs. I lost 4 stone in 5 months when I have up drinking 21 years ago, taking advice from jockey friends on as to how to combine not drinking with changing my eating: no other humans get weighted up to 32 times a day! starting with a 1 day total fast, and moving to eating only once a day, it worked.
Of course, thanks to America, we now have ” fattist” and ” super sized’ models and ” influencers, aka blomster neo lard filled bin liners on legs like motorway bridge supports.
ED in the US means something else.
Because we see health through the diagnosis and treatment of disease (which works well for selling tests, treatments and pills) such ‘totting up’ of diagnoses seems a normal activity. If we would start to think about fostering health and helping with making people (and farms) more resilient as a strategy towards a healthy/wellbeing society, our approach and way of looking at disorders will change dramatically and outcomes of such a health service (not disease service as it is now) will be dramatically better.
As a recovered anorexic/bulimic who failed to know how to help my daughter when she became underweight and diet obsessed in her late teens (ten years ago), I agree that preventative diet, body-confidence and healthy weight management help for young adolescent girls and their mothers is urgently needed. I outline a proposal for such help in my new book The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan for Women’s Weight Health and Humour: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fatter-Sex-Battle-Womens-Weight/dp/0473697769