Eating Disorders: Just Dying to be Perfect

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As the "ideal" women’s body has become progressively thinner over the past decades, the eating disorder anorexia has become progressively more prevalent. Anorexia is a disease in which a person eats nothing beyond minimal amounts of food so that her body weight drops dangerously. It is no wonder with all of the cultural messages of thinness being aimed at women, that 90-95% of anorexics are female, 25.7% of all female ballet dancers are anorexic, and that the percentages are similarly high for female models and athletes (Malson, 1998). Six to eight percent of young women have been diagnosed. For some the disease takes a devastating and irreversible course; 20% of anorexic patients will die and as many as half of those will be from suicide (Sullivan, 1995). It is an extremely painful disease with many emotional hardships for all involved. Anorexia, like many psychological disorders in the DSM-IV, has medical, biological, personality, and social components and implications. Anorexia Nervosa is clearly a multifaceted disorder, but the aim of this paper is to explore more deeply the moral issues associated with it. These issues will be centered on shame and guilt. However, other moral issues clearly play a role in the emergence and maintenance of the disorder and will be discussed as well. Research directly linking these issues is not as prolific as the research surrounding the clinical components of anorexia. The general conclusion that feelings of shame and guilt that are focused specifically on eating are related to eating disturbance is well documented (Frank, 1991; Burney & Irwin, 2000). Burney and Irwin (2000) say that some of the symptoms of eating disorders lead one to believe that shame plays a key role in them. Fodor ... ... middle of paper ... ...entation of femininity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 693-702. Noll, S.M, & Fredrickson, B.L. (1998). A mediational model linking self-objectification, body shame, and disordered eating. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22, 623-626. Silverstein, Perdue, & Peterson (1986). Mass media is promoting a thin standard of bodily attractiveness. Sex Roles, 14, 519-532. Steiner-Adair, C. (1990). The body politic: Normal female adolescent development and the development of eating disorders. In C. Gilligan, N. Lyons, & T. Hamner, Making Connections. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sullivan, P.F. (1995). Mortality in anorexia nervosa. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, 1073-1074. Wilcox, K & Laird, J.D. (2000). The impact of mass media images of super-slender women on women’s self-esteem. Journal of Research in Personality, 34(2), 278-286.

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