My problem with how eating disorder narratives shape our thinking
I know better, writes Claire Hennessy, yet my ideas about eating disorders are influenced by stories I read, which suggest they are for young women with little else to worry about
Stories matter. Stories about beautiful, thin girls who look as though they suffer from an eating disorder and who get the help they need and are then cured obscure the ugliness and complexity of disorders which are not just about weight but about having a damaging relationship with food, with your mind, and with your body
This is Eating Disorder Awareness Week, and immediately I think – as do many people – of a teenage girl. Blonde, white, well-educated – she goes to a good school and seems to have everything sorted. Rewarded for what looks like “perfection”, it is very easy for her to take a diet too far and to start counting calories obsessively. Initially, she will be rewarded for losing weight – as women are – and then someone (typically her mother) will be concerned. There will be therapy and then hospitalisation – the availability of these things, and the cost, is never an issue – and then after some resistance, she will accept that she is sick and begin the process of recovery. Sometimes this will be prompted by the death of someone else in hospital – a martyr to our protagonist’s cause. All better now. The end.
