Word: anorexia
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...good enough, of not doing what is expected of them," says Dr. Hilde Bruch, professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "Anoretics want to reassure themselves that they are really in control. There is an obsession with slimness and achievement." Bruch believes that the incidence of anorexia will continue to increase as greater demands are made on women...
Susan was a victim of anorexia nervosa, "the starvation disease" or "Twiggy syndrome," a rare and bizarre emotional disorder that has been occurring more frequently in the past few years. Of those affected, 80% are female, mostly in their early teens. Typically they are intelligent, ambitious, middle-and upper-class girls who are perfectionists and eager to please their mothers and fathers. Suddenly they start to diet and then simply stop eating, sometimes losing 50 lbs. or so in a few months. Some, like Susan, now 21, seek treatment and manage to get back to a normal weight. Others, with...
...easy to leave the world, Santayana wrote, once we know what it is. If Santayana was suggesting a satiety of the mind, André Gide, in his 81st year, was more keenly aware of a flagging of the senses. He had discovered a word from the Greek for it, anorexia (lack of appetite), but he added: "I find it hard to console myself for not knowing Greek...
When people lose all desire to eat, for no apparent physical or emotional cause, doctors call it anorexia nervosa (nervous lack of appetite). For three generations they have argued about how best to treat it, with recent opinion favoring an analytic type of psychiatry. Now in the British Medical Journal, a brusque, no-nonsense Welshman indicates that it is time to boot the psychiatrists out and pump the patient full of food. His simple reasoning: the only treatable aspect of the baffling disorder is starvation, and the cure for starvation is food...
...have general physicians let anorexia nervosa slip away to the borderlands of psychiatry? Probably, suggests Dr. Williams, because patients often have emotional symptoms suggesting schizophrenia, and the G.P. feels out of his depth. But none of the 53 patients in this study ever needed long care in a mental hospital. And 23 of them recovered completely-some of them spontaneously, others after routine follow-up attention and reassurance. "Specialized psychotherapy," says Dr. Williams firmly, "is not indicated...