scholarly journals Material Environments and the Shaping of Anorexic Embodiment: Towards A Materialist Account of Eating Disorders

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Eli ◽  
Anna Lavis
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Treatment Resistance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eating Disordered ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Body Project ◽  
Embodied Experiences

AbstractAnorexia nervosa is a paradoxical disorder, regarded across disciplines as a body project and yet also an illness of disembodied subjectivity. This overlooks the role that material environments—including objects and spaces—play in producing embodied experiences of anorexia both within and outside treatment. To address this gap, this paper draws together two ethnographic studies of anorexia to explore the shared themes unearthed by research participants’ engagements with objects that move across boundaries between treatment spaces and everyday lives. Demonstrating how the anorexic body is at once both phenomenologically lived and socio-medically constituted, we argue that an attention to materiality is crucial to understanding lived experiences. A materialist account of anorexia extends the literature on treatment resistance in eating disorders and offers a reconceptualisation of ‘the body in treatment’, showing how  objects and spaces shape, maintain, and even ‘trigger’ anorexia. Therefore, against the background of the high rates of relapse in eating disorders, this analysis calls for consideration of how interventions can better take account of eating disordered embodiment as shaped by material environments.

Anorexia Nervosa and Depression in a Woman Blind since the Age of Nine Months

1993 ◽  
Vol 38 (7) ◽  
pp. 469-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford W. Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Eating Disorder ◽  
Major Depression ◽  
Food Intake ◽  
Older Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Atypical Presentation ◽  
History Of

A woman aged 58 who has been blind since the age of nine months presented with major depression and a 40 year history of an eating disorder characterized by a restriction of food intake and body disparagement. The case is additional evidence that a specifically visual body image is not essential for the development of anorexia nervosa and supports the view that the concept of body image is unnecessary and unproductive in eating disorders. Greater emphasis should be placed on attitudes and feelings toward the body, and the possibility of an eating disorder should be considered in cases of older women with an atypical presentation.

scholarly journals Food, Bodies, and the “Stuff” of (Not) Eating in Anorexia

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 56-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Lavis
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Dynamic Process ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Form Part

The diverse materialities that form part of lived experiences of mental ill-health and its treatment have been largely overlooked in research. Arguing that such a focus is key to enhancing understandings of eating disorders, this article engages with food-centered practices in anorexia nervosa. Against the background of work that has recognized the desire to maintain their illness among some individuals, the article suggests that holding onto anorexia is a dynamic process enacted through eating as well as by avoiding food. Individuals’ negotiations of ingesting and digesting elucidate the blurred intersections between eating and not eating, edible and inedible. They reveal that what is experienced as eating may not look like eating and vice versa. As contingent forms of eating thereby emerge and dissolve through anorexia-focused practices, vectors of ingestion and assimilation come to be remapped and eating delineated as an act that may take place across corporeal surfaces and among multiple bodies. While such an engagement with materialities offers key insights into anorexia, it also contributes to a wider theorizing of the act of eating within food studies literature; the article asks what eating is, as well as what forms it takes. This problematizes taken-for-granted relationships among eating, bodies, and food. Their dislocations demonstrate eating to produce and reconfigure, as well as displace or break down, materialities.

‘The sickness stands at your shoulder …’: Embodiment and cognitive metaphor in Hornbacher’sWasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karsten Senkbeil ◽  
Nicola Hoppe
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Eating Disorders ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor Theory ◽  
Cognitive Metaphor ◽  
Bodily Experiences ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Marya Hornbacher ◽  
Linguistic Approaches

This paper applies cognitive linguistic approaches, particularly conceptual metaphor theory, to the study of literature, and analyses how Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998) by Marya Hornbacher communicates embodied experiences such as sickness, hunger, and (self-)loathing with the help of conceptual metaphors. It explores how the author renegotiates and partly recontextualizes highly conventionalized metaphors around eating disorders, mental illness, and identity to create new meaning, and how this strategy helped explain the mindset of a person with anorexia and bulimia to a broad critical readership in the late 1990s. This paper hence hypothesizes that the book’s emphasis on metaphors as a means to articulate bodily experiences surrounding a mental disorder may hint towards larger trends concerning the representation of the body–mind relationship in literature and culture in the last two decades.

Is there a Relationship between Sexual Abuse or Incest and Eating Disorders?

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 656-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Sloan ◽  
P. Leichner
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Childhood Sexual Abuse ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Sexual Trauma ◽  
Early History ◽  
Eating Disordered ◽  
Sexual Conflicts ◽  
History Of

The significance of sexual conflicts in many patients with eating disorders has been well documented. However, even when these have been considered to have some degree of etiological importance, the occurrence of actual sexual trauma or incest in the early lives of these patients has been generally neglected in the literature. At one point in time, it was noted that five of six patients on an inpatient unit for eating disorders revealed an early history of sexual abuse or incest. These five cases are described. A parallel is drawn between the psychological problems experienced by victims of childhood sexual abuse and by patients with anorexia nervosa and/or bulimia. Our suspicion that these experiences may not be atypical led to the present article, which has implications for the investigation and management of eating-disordered patients.

The Body Project

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Stice ◽  
Paul Rohde ◽  
Heather Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Eating Disorder ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Prevention Program ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
The Body ◽  
Thin Ideal ◽  
Eating Disorder Prevention ◽  
Body Project ◽  
Disorder Prevention

The Body Project is an empirically based eating disorder prevention program that offers young women an opportunity to critically consider the costs of pursuing the ultra-thin ideal promoted in the mass media, and it improves body acceptance and reduces risk for developing eating disorders. Young women with elevated body dissatisfaction are recruited for group sessions in which they participate in a series of verbal, written, and behavioral exercises in which they consider the negative effects of pursuing the thin-ideal. This online resource provides information on the significance of body image and eating disorders, the intervention theory, the evidence base which supports the theory, recruitment and training procedures, solutions to common challenges, and a new program aimed at reducing obesity onset, as well as intervention scripts and participant handouts. It is the only currently available eating disorder prevention program that has been shown to reduce risk for onset of eating disorders and received support in trials conducted by several independent research groups.

Computerised Psychoeducation for Patients with Eating Disorders

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Andrewes ◽  
Claudia Mulder ◽  
Peter O'connor ◽  
Jim McLennan ◽  
Stephen Say ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Health Education ◽  
Diet Group ◽  
Therapeutic Effects ◽  
Eating Disordered ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Premorbid Intelligence ◽  
Adult Reading ◽  
Computer Based

Objective: To assess a new computer-based method of health education for patients with bulimia and anorexia nervosa. Method: Fifty-four patients with DSM-III-R diagnosed eating disorders were allocated randomly to one of two groups, one receiving a computer-presented health education package called DIET, the other experiencing a placebo computer-based program. Each group contained 14 anorexia nervosa patients, four anorexic patients with bulimia and nine bulimic patients. Groups were equivalent in terms of the severity of their eating disorder as measured on the Eating Disorders Inventory and their estimated premorbid intelligence according to the National Adult Reading Test. Both groups were assessed before and after intervention on a questionnaire measuring knowledge of eating disorders and a questionnaire measuring attitudes to eating-disordered behaviour. Results: The DIET group members were significantly improved when compared to the placebo group in terms of both their knowledge and attitudes towards their disorder. The patients rated the DIET program as being both easy to use and helpful. Conclusion: The DIET program has been found to be a resource-efficient means of health education for patients with eating disorders. Further research is required to assess whether the program has therapeutic effects in terms of behavioural improvement.

scholarly journals “This journey has definitely changed me”: An ethnographic narrative exploring disabled peoples’ lives through embodied experiences and identity negotiation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Social Model Of Disability ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Experiences

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>

scholarly journals “This journey has definitely changed me”: An ethnographic narrative exploring disabled peoples’ lives through embodied experiences and identity negotiation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Callan Sait
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Social Model Of Disability ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Embodied Experiences

<p>Following calls from both disability studies and anthropology to provide ethnographic accounts of disability, this thesis presents the narratives of nine people living with disability, focusing on what disability means to them, how it is incorporated into their identities, and how it shapes their lived experiences. While accounts of disability from disability studies often focus on the social model of disability (Shakespeare 2006) and emphasise social stigma and oppression (Goffman 1967, Susman 1994), anthropological accounts often emphasise the suffering and search for cures (Rapp and Ginsburg 2012) that is assumed to accompany disability. Both approaches have their benefits, but neither pay particularly close attention to the personal experiences of individuals, on their own terms.  By taking elements from both disciplines, this thesis aims to present a balanced view that emphasises the lived experiences of individuals with disability, and uses these experiences as a starting point for wider social analysis. The primary focus of this thesis is understanding how disability shapes an individual’s identity: what physical, emotional, and social factors influence how these people are perceived – by themselves and others? Through my participants’ narratives I explore how understandings of normal bodies and normal lives influence their sense of personhood, and investigate the role of stigma in mediating social encounters and self-concepts. Furthermore, I undertake a novel study of the role of technology in the lives of people living with disability. My work explores how both assistive and non-assistive (‘general’) technologies are perceived and utilised by my participants in ways that effect not just the physical experience of disability, but also social perceptions and personal understandings of the body/self.  I argue that although the social model of disability is an excellent analytical tool, and one which has provided tangible benefits for disabled people, its political nature can sometimes lead to a homogenisation of disabled experiences; something which this thesis is intended to remedy by providing ethnographic narratives of disability, grounded in the embodied experiences of individuals.</p>

Etica ed estetica per l’anoressia / Ethics and aesthetics for anorexia

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-436
Author(s):  
Paolo Marino Cattorini
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Eating Disorder ◽  
Weight Gain ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sick People ◽  
Self Image

L’anoressia nervosa rischia di venir fraintesa, etichettandola come mero disturbo neurobiologico e affrontandola con tattiche assistenziali, che mirano semplicemente alla rapida correzione del peso. Un approccio fenomenologico coglie invece nel disturbo alimentare una strategia di liberazione, per quanto rischiosa e piena di contraddizioni. Nel presente articolo abbiamo indicato tre dimensioni etiche ed estetiche di questa pericolosa trasformazione di sé. L’anoressica scolpisce il corpo in forme dissonanti, al modo di una body artist; ella scrive nella carne la propria storia alla luce di un mito affettivo, che la guida come un racconto esemplare di formazione; infine l’anoressica prova per il cibo il disgusto che ella vive nei confronti di relazioni mancate di cui ha ancora disperata fame. La persona che soffre tenta di dirigere perfezionisticamente, attraverso la malattia, una trasformazione individuale, imbattendosi in un mondo di oggetti trasfigurati (fra cui i cibi, le sostanze alimentari), un mondo simile a quello istituito dall’arte contemporanea. Per questi motivi, il lavoro medico-psicologico condotto sui disturbi alimentari è più efficace quando si posseggono competenze in ambito umanistico, particolarmente di ordine etico ed estetico. ---------- Anorexia nervosa risks being misunderstood by labelling it merely as a neurobiological disorder or by tackling it only with behavioral advice, in order to rapidly achieve some weight gain. On the contrary, a phenomenological approach recognizes in an eating disorder also an ethical strategy of liberation, although it may well be risky and full of contradictions. This article indicates three ethical and aesthetic dimensions of this dangerous transformation of self-image. Anorexia sculpts the body in dissonant forms, in the way of a body artist; it writes in the flesh a suffering story in the light of an affective myth, which guides the patient towards an ideal of mature development. Finally, sick people feel the same disgust for food that they experience with regard to missed or damaged relationships of which they still desperately hunger for. Through the illness, an attempt is made to manage in a perfectionist way the bodily transformation, but the result is that they come upon a disquieting world of transfigured objects, a world similar to that established by some contemporary art movements. For these reasons, the medical-psychological work carried out on eating disorders requires competence in the field of medical humanities and particularly in the sphere of ethical and aesthetic education.

Eating disorders

Psychiatry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca McKnight ◽  
Jonathan Price ◽  
John Geddes
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Eating Disorder ◽  
Weight Control ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Classification Systems ◽  
Eating Disordered ◽  
Icd 10 ◽  
Abnormal Eating ◽  
Significant Impairment

The term ‘eating disorder’ describes a range of conditions characterized by abnormal eating habits and methods of weight control which lead to a significant impairment of psychological, social, and physical functioning. Eating disorders are serious, complex conditions; they are not simply a problem of eating too much or too little, or an attempt to achieve the perfect physique. Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality of any psychiatric disorder, and it is notoriously difficult both to engage eating- disordered patients, and to treat them success­fully. There is a positive association between early diag­nosis and prognosis, so the skills to recognize an eating disorder— whether they present with psychological or physical symptoms— are essential for all clinicians. At the time of writing, the description of eating dis­orders within diagnostic classification systems has been undergoing considerable change. Under the ICD- 10 and DSM- IV classification systems, three main eating disorders were recognized (Fig. 27.1): … 1 anorexia nervosa; 2 bulimia nervosa; 3 eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS). … However, this classification has been shown to have various difficulties: … ● The majority of cases were attracting an ‘EDNOS’ label, whereas it was supposed to be a residual category (Fig. 27.1). ● EDNOS contained within it the subdiagnosis ‘binge eating disorder’ (BED). Recent research has demonstrated BED accounts for approximately 10 per cent of eating disorders in clinical cohorts. ● The categorical nature of the system does not allow for the fact that most eating disorders change over time, and frequently move back and forth along the spectrum of presentations. ● The DSM- 5 classification system (see ‘Further reading’) has tried to tackle the first two of these difficulties, and the upcoming ICD- 11 will echo these changes (Table 27.1) There is now a separate category for BED, and three other defined conditions. This is a positive change, but has only reduced the ‘NOS/ unspecified’ percentage to some extent, and has not considered the changeable nature of eating disorder symptomatology. Hopefully in the future a solution to the difficulty of turning a spectrum of pathology into a categorical system will emerge.

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