Word: nervosa
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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...
...Richardson got to know them, Catherine had come to the New York Hospital clinic for a heart murmur. He later found that Mrs. Q was bothered by a gastric ulcer, that Mr. Q habitually vomited sometimes 20 times a night, that Agnes had a well-developed case of anorexia nervosa (nervous rejection of food). Both parents had very bad teeth...
...psychiatrists, Linnea's case was no puzzle. Anorexia nervosa (hysterical lack of appetite) often occurs in unstable women who are unconsciously afraid to grow up, and, according to Freudians, derive a childish sexual pleasure from finicky eating (oral eroticism). Some, like Linnea, gorge themselves on childish foods, others retreat all the way back to the suckling stage, stubbornly take nothing but milk. From such disastrous whims, say doctors, few recover...