Eating Disorders-Anorexia

Posted by: TanyaW on: December 2, 2010

• In: Debate | Education | Mental Health
• 2 Comments

by Tanya. W

As I have mentioned I have returned to third level education. I’ve been working on
assignments and the topic I was working on was eating disorders with special emphasis on anorexia. So I’ve been research and reading piece after piece on the effects signs symptoms and what it actually is.

Well I suppose for those of u with the miss conception that people normally have I will explain what anorexia actually is the full name is Anorexia nervosa and it literally means ‘loss of appetite for nervous reasons’. The term anorexia nervosa was established in 1873 by Sir William Gull, one of Queen Victoria‘s personal physicians. The term is of Greek origin: a (α, prefix of negation), n (ν, link between two vowels) and orexis (ορεξις, appetite), thus meaning a lack of desire to eat.

Anorexia nervosa is a severe, life-threatening disorder in which the individual refuses to maintain a minimally normal body weight, is intensely afraid of gaining weight, and exhibits a significant distortion in the perception of the shape or size of his body, as well as dissatisfaction with his body shape and size.

People with anorexia often hide their condition, so the warning signs are not always easy to spot. Furthermore, anorexics will typically try to explain away their disordered eating behaviours when confronted. But as anorexia progresses, the signs and symptoms become increasingly obvious and difficult to deny.

What sets someone on a course toward self-starvation? It’s easy to blame a culture that equates slenderness with beauty and success and portrays stick-thin women as the physical ideal, but eating disorders have been around for centuries.

While the physical and emotional consequences of anorexia can be devastating, the good news is that it’s a treatable condition. With the right treatment team, people with anorexia can and do get better. They can regain their health, learn to eat normally again, and develop healthier attitudes about food and their bodies.

Since anorexia involves both mind and body, both attitudes and behaviours, a team approach is often best. Those who may be involved in anorexia treatment include medical doctors, mental health professionals, and dieticians. The participation and support of family members also makes a big difference in anorexia treatment success.

Eating disorders are becoming more common with 200,000 people in Ireland are affected with eating disorders. With over 10% of people diagnosed in Ireland under the age of 10. It is becoming a huge problem in Ireland and there are a great number of people dying from it each year. The average annual mortality associated with anorexia are more than 12 times higher than the annual death rate due to all causes for females 15-24 years old, and more than 200 times higher than the suicide rate of females in the general population.

This is not just a girls condition man are affected by it as well. “[Eating disorders] have been seen largely as an issue affecting women, and because of that, I think men have been far less likely to identify themselves as affected by it or to seek out treatment — much in the same way as men with breast cancer tend to show up in breast cancer clinics much, much later,” says the study’s author, D. Blake Woodside, MD.

Men need the same treatment as women but don’t take up treatment as they don’t believe that men can have anorexia as it seen as a female disease and also it is said that if males have it they are normally homosexual which is a really bad misconception.

So while I was research about anorexia I came across a really frightening thing that if you search anorexia one of the top searches is anorexia tips and there are about 2,070,000 results which only take (0.08 seconds) to find. This is extremely worrying as you can get all this information online on how to be anorexic properly and the best ways of doing it.

This is crazy as there are only 1,530,000 results which take (0.52 seconds) to findhelp for anorexia online. So for one there is the time difference there is between the time it takes for the search and then there’s like half a million in the difference of results found. This is completely outrageous as even the national organisation for eating disorders don’t give adequate help online yet you can get all the information you want on how to become anorexic and how to do it discretely so you don’t get caught. This I believe is completely unacceptable as I know someone who is battling anorexia at the moment and I have seen how it is consuming her whole life and how it is affecting her and her family.

I don’t think that these pages should be allowed I know there’s the whole freedom of speech and information act but when it comes to giving people information on how to kill yourself surely that isn’t right and shouldn’t be allowed to happen. As telling someone how to become anorexic you are helping them kill them self this is illegal in Ireland. So surely the government should be able to do something to stop them being able to add information or have information in the first place about this.

There isn’t enough awareness around eating disorders especial around anorexia and the statistics speak for themselves with the number of people dying from anorexia is higher than the number of deaths from suicide. This is completely unacceptable and and more awareness needs to be made around eating disorders and people should be educated on the signs and symptoms of anorexia nervosa as the soon it is caught the better. Unfortunately the last person who realises they are hurting themselves is the anorexic themselves even if they are on their death bed they will deny they have a problem.

It is a cruel and horrible illness that needs more awareness not more information on how to encourage the illness.