By now, almost everyone has heard of at least one of the types of eating disorder. These are the kinds of social disorder in which a person becomes obsessed with their weight, body shape or food intake, and tries to change the way they eat food in order to match some compulsive goal. This type of disorder may be a mental health issue, and the actions it engenders often put the sufferer’s life in danger.
The main eating disorders are anorexia nervosa, where people almost literally starves themselves to death trying to lose weight; bulimia, in which they let themselves eat but “purge” the food in some way shortly afterward; and the binge eating disorder, where eating large amounts of food is often used as a comfort after bad experiences.
These types of disorders may also be accompanied by a mental disorder, such as clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, substance abuse or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Whether any of these “cause” each other, though, has yet to be established.
The causes of the type of social disorder that focuses on food and eating are still not really known. However, there is evidence to suggest both a strong physical factor, as well as a socio-psychological factor. For example, there are associations between brain lesions and tumors and disorders related to eating. Certain hormone imbalances are also strongly associated. At the same time, social factors like child abuse, social isolation, or parental or peer influence have also been shown to relate to these eating problems in a marked way.
What this means is that while diagnosis of this social disorder isn’t ultimately that difficult, treatment options are all over the map. No effective drug treatment has yet been developed, so various forms of cognitive therapy are the only available approaches in dealing with this mental health issue. These can include nutrition counseling as well as interpersonal and family therapies, and in some cases even art therapy. Each of these methods has a rate of success that seems to be rising over the years, so some refinement is obviously occurring. Improvements can’t come too soon for people with these disorders, since their very health can be so severely affected.
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