Science of Eating Disorders
Patient Perspectives on Anorexia, Treatment, and Therapeutic Alliance
Dear Science of Eating Disorders readers, please welcome Andrea, our newest contributor! Below is her introduction and first post.
Hello SEDs readers, my name is Andrea and I’m excited to be contributing to the blog. I have an undergraduate degree in sociology and I am currently a Masters student studying family relations and human development. My research is looking at the experiences of young women in recovery from eating disorders, and uses qualitative methods including narrative interviews and digital stories to explore stories of eating disorders and recovery. I am particularly interested in stories that fall outside of the “norm,” as I feel that we sometimes hear a limited, scripted story of what it means to be someone who has had and recovered from an eating disorder.
I myself am recovered from ED-NOS, and I am happy to be making meaning from my experiences by exploring eating disorders in an academic way. I hope to be able to add my voice to the conversation–I’ll be looking mainly at the qualitative literature on eating disorders, their treatment, and recovery. You can …
Pregnancy, Motherhood, and Eating Disorders: Women’s Experiences
There is a common misconception that eating disorders somehow disappear during pregnancy; that becoming a mother stops all those silly worries about being slim and attractive. This is not necessarily the case, and unfortunately, there is a lot of stigma associated with talking about disordered eating behaviours during pregnancy. Openly admitting to it is an invitation, it seems, to being called selfish and vain. The implication is that eating disorders are something only young girls struggle with, and that pregnancy and motherhood are such big and important things that they should be enough to overcome an eating disorder.
In a large population-based study of 12,254 pregnant women in the UK, over 4% of women experienced past or present eating disorders (Micali et al., 2007). In this study, Tierney and colleagues wanted to find out how those women with present or past eating disorders experienced pregnancy and early motherhood.
They interviewed eight women between the ages of 17 to 37 about their experiences during pregnancy and (if applicable) motherhood. Some women were expecting their first child while others already had three. Five out …
The “Double Life” of Bulimia Nervosa: Patients’ Perspectives
My psychiatrist once compared my life to Dexter. He said I was living a double life. It was the summer before my final year in undergrad and I was working in a neuroscience lab. Yet things were so bad that at one point I was very close to quitting and doing Day Program treatment. (I didn’t, and things ended up getting better, thankfully.)
This post is going to be more personal than most. One, I can relate well to the topic. Two, I feel that I can give voice to it under my real name. (As opposed to just discuss it abstractly, or anonymously. There’s nothing wrong with being anonymous, but I feel that, for many reasons I am in a position where I don’t feel I have to be anonymous any more.)
I think this is important because there are a lot of myths that surround eating disorders and those who suffer from them, and I want to do my part in crushing those myths. Moreover, while restrictive anorexia nervosa is often, at least partly, associated with positive traits …
Genetics: Friend or Foe in Ending Eating Disorder Stigma?
Refrigerator mothers or the idealization of thin models? Toxic families or toxins in our diets? Oh, if only determining the cause (because it has to be just one, right?) of eating disorders was that simple. All behaviour has a biological basis, a neurobiological correlate. The way our brains function—and the resulting behaviours— is due to complex interactions between our genome, epigenome, and the environment. Eating disorders do not have a single cause; we cannot put the blame solely on families, or thin models, vanity or genetics.
As a science grad student, I am interested in how non-scientists interpret scientific findings on mental disorders, particularly eating disorders. With respect to eating disorders, I am interested in how patients’ understanding of the science shapes the way they view themselves and their eating disorders, as well as how it shapes their treatment and recovery.
In a recent paper, Michele Easter wanted to find out just that; she wanted to know how patients with eating disorders view the increasing focus of genetics in eating disorders on ED stigma. She interviewed 50 women with a history of …
How Do Anorexia Nervosa Patients Define Recovery and Engage in Treatment? The Need for Individualized Treatment
Dear Science of Eating Disorders readers, please welcome Gina, our newest contributor! Gina is looking forward to writing for the blog and enriching the content with her own unique interests, perspectives and experiences. You can find out more about Gina on the ‘About Gina‘ page and you should also check out her personal blog about eating disorder recovery (and all things related) here. You can contact Gina at gina@scienceofeds.org.
Just a note, do keep in mind that I (Tetyana) try to give as much freedom as possible to guest writers and contributors to write about their own interests and viewpoints. That means that we don’t all necessary agree; there is no joint agenda. My primary reason for wanting more contributors is to broader the content, vary the writing styles and negate the individual biases we all have that are the result of our differing eating disorder histories, experiences with treatment and educational backgrounds. Our desire to understand, translate and summarize peer-reviewed ED literature is what we all share in common.
One difficulty in measuring rates of recovery for patients …
Understanding Disordered Eating in Transgendered Individuals
Gender nonconformity is the second most popular search term that leads people to Science of Eating Disorders. (After “science of eds” and beating “science of eating disorders”.) Not far behind are variants of “FtM/MtF/transsexual/transgender” combined with “eating disorder/anorexia/bulimia”. That’s telling. It means there is little information on this topic. And it is not just that there’s too little information available to the public – there are only a handful of published studies in the peer-reviewed literature.
One study (which I discussed in my previous post: Gender Nonconformity, Transsexuality and Eating Disorders) published by Vocks et al (2009), compared disordered eating patterns, body image disturbances and self-image scores between male-to-female (MtF) and female-to-male (FtM) transsexuals (131 participants in both groups), to cisgender female and male controls as well as to females with eating disorders.
Overall, they found disordered eating patterns reported by MtF and FtM transsexuals were in the middle of those diagnosed with eating disorders and non-ED, cisgender controls. More specifically, MtF individuals had more severe disordered eating pathology than both female and male control groups, whereas FtM individuals reported …
What’s it Like to be a Man with an Eating Disorder?
What is it like for men to live with an eating disorder? What is it like for men to seek and receive treatment for an eating disorder? These are the questions that Kate Robinson and colleagues asked a group of eight men who were receiving treatment (inpatient, day patient or outpatient) at two ED treatment centers in the UK. Their goal was to find out if and how men’s experiences with an eating disorder differ from women with eating disorders.
Men account for roughly 10% of eating disorder patients (when considering anorexia and bulimia, not including binge eating disorder, which is not yet part of the DSM). I suspect this number is actually higher – as less men probably realize they have an ED, admit to having an ED or seek treatment, precisely due to the issues raised in this article (and others). Given that men form a sizeable minority of ED patients, and yet many individuals – clinicians among them – believe EDs are a women-only issue, knowing and understanding the experiences of male ED patients is crucial for …
Who Gets Treatment? Your Ethnicity Matters
In 2010, I wrote a literature review on eating disorders in women of color in North America. I expected to find only a few articles on this subject – every lecture in my undergrad psychology classes, every piece of information targeted to the public, every discussion I had, it seemed, either omitted the existence of EDs in non-stereotypical (white, female, heterosexual, adolescent, upper/middle-class) populations altogether – or glossed over it with a footnote on “acculturation” that reductively attributed the disorder to a misguided desire to fit into the dominant culture, much as other women might aspire to look like the images of female bodies in mass media. (Acculturative stress is actually far more complex than this, and furthermore is not necessarily the sole or even the primary cause of EDs for all people of color.)
Contrary to expectation, my first database search turned up pages of articles. This was obviously an area that was being explored by researchers; there was a good body of work confirming the existence of EDs in people of color, so why wasn’t this knowledge …
Gender Nonconformity, Transsexuality and Eating Disorders
Too many people still mistakenly believe that eating disorders are for the Mary-Kates, Nicole Richies and Lara-Flynn Boyles, or vain adolescent and teenage girls aspiring to be just like them. Actually, as I’ve blogged earlier, even male veterans in late middle age are not immune to struggling with anorexia and bulimia nervosa. All in all, males make up ~ 5-10% of all eating disorder sufferers.
But what about those that dread having to check off “male/man” or “female/woman” on a data form? The individuals who feel their gender identity is not the same as their birth sex. Perhaps they were born in a female body, with two XX chromosomes, but they feel and prefer to think of themselves as males, or the reverse? There’s some research (albeit limited, due to the rarity of both gender dysphoria and eating disorders) that suggests these individuals face an increased risk of developing eating disorders.
The most relevant and recent study on the intersection of gender identity and eating disorders that I found was published by Vocks et al. in 2009. The goal …
- Transitioning from Adolescent to Adult Eating Disorder Treatment Programs: What Are The Challenges?
- Bingeing and Purging: Keeping the “Positives” and Eliminating The Negatives?
- Dancing Your Way to Recovery from Anorexia Nervosa
- International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED) 2013: Personal Reflections
- Pills for Bites: The Alarming Link between Drug Abuse and Eating Disorders
- Factors Associated with Recovery from Anorexia Nervosa
- Patient Perspectives on Anorexia, Treatment, and Therapeutic Alliance
- Family-Based Treatment for Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa: Hype or Hope?
- Nonpurging Bulimia Nervosa: Where Does It Fit?
- What’s The Point of Bingeing and Purging? And Why Can’t You Just Stop?
- Should Insurance Companies Cover Residential Treatment for Eating Disorders?
- Does Too Much Exposure to Thin Models Cause Eating Disorders? Anorexia, Bulimia in Blind Women
- Are All Anorexics Just Afraid Of Being Fat and Can We Blame The Western Media?
- What’s Wrong with How We Talk About Eating Disorders in the Media and in ED Communities – Part 2
- When Clinicians Do More Harm Than Good (Attitudes Toward Patients with Eating Disorders)
- Family-Based Treatment for Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa: Hype or Hope?
- International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED) 2013: Personal Reflections
- The “Double Life” of Bulimia Nervosa: Patients’ Perspectives
- How Can We Treat Chronic and Severe Anorexia Nervosa? (On the Need for New Approaches)
- What’s Wrong with How We Talk About Eating Disorders in the Media and in ED Communities – Part 1
-
ES I'm not sure that it's just an 'ano
-
Liz Agreed! It sounds like they are missing out on a L
-
Andrea Hi Liz, Sorry if I was unclear in the post; in th
-
-
Charlotte I can't articulate how much I can relate to e
-
peridot
This article really resonates with me because I ha
-
Pre-morbid BMI, weight restoration, and amenorrhoe
-
ko I read your comment and can relate to everything y
-
Liz
"Could it not be a more parsimonious explanat
-
A:)
Also, this post made me wonder. . . what about jus
Science of Eating Disorders by Tetyana Pekar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Design modified from Woothemes
