Psychiatry starts to lose its grip on anorexia nervosa

[Cinders66]

I heard on the radio this morning about this genetic study of anorexia nervosa. Basically it seems that there is preliminary evidence that anorexia nervosa has an autoimmune/biomedical basis.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170612094212.htm



I'm not surprised, as I have heard people with anorexia nervosa speak of how eating makes them feel physically ill. The researcher I heard was hopeful that biomedical treatments would eventually be developed.

Disappointingly however, she said that psychotherapy was still very important 'as we don't have any other treatment yet, and it's crucial that these people eat'. If I was a young woman with anorexia nervosa and was told 'you aren't eating because you don't want to grow into an adult or you are reacting to your family over-controlling you', I'd be thinking 'rubbish, you have no idea what you are talking about, go away'. I wish people understood that psychotherapy is not necessarily a benign treatment and can cause all sorts of new problems for the patient and their family.

I had a carer, very healthy happy now who had a brief episode of anorexia in her teens. She said it was in response to some difficulty her family was going through and it gave her a sense of control. She now has no food issues and is on the larger size body type and loving it so I'm not sure in some circumstances that anorexia isn't along psychological lines but clearly in others there could well be to be deeper biological drivers.