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ANOREXIA NERVOSA AN EXTREME FORM
OF NORMAL BEHAVIOR, EXPERT SAYS
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Is anorexia nervosa best understood as a psychological and biological disease, an abnormality? Or is it possible that anorexia, a disorder of self-starvation usually accompanied by rigorous exercise, is an extreme form of normal behavior for girls and young women in a culture that emphasizes dieting, exercise and bodily control?
Helen Gremillion, the Peg Zeglin Brand Chair and assistant professor of gender studies at Indiana University Bloomington, believes that anorexia is an extreme form of normal behavior.
Before the 1970s, the incidence of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders was rare, but since then there has been a dramatic increase of this phenomenon in the United States. During the 1970s, at the same time the diet industry and physical fitness movement took off, the incidence of anorexia more than doubled. A life-threatening medical condition, anorexia is found primarily among Euro-American, middle-class girls and young women, and according to Gremillion it is extremely difficult to cure. Given that anorexia has an approximately 10 percent mortality rate -- the highest of any psychiatric illness -- and that most patients who live never fully recover, the need to better understand the prevalence and tenacity of this disease is obvious.
Current treatments focus upon the disease as a psychological and biological problem, and sometimes one of family dynamics. But Gremillion is interested in the cultural and social forces that influence anorexia. Why is anorexia so overwhelmingly feminized? Why is it virtually unknown among non-market economies and certain ethnic groups? Why is it so difficult to treat?
Based on extensive participant-observation in a psychiatric treatment program, Gremillion believes that successful treatment of anorexia must consider the disorder's cultural context as part and parcel of the treatment. Furthermore, her research shows that most current therapies unwittingly participate in the same cultural ideals of physical fitness, individualism and family life that cause the problem.
Gremillion joined the IU faculty in 1998 as the initial appointment to the Peg Zeglin Brand Chair in Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include medical anthropology, gender and scientific epistemologies, consumer culture and feminist ethnographies.
The Peg Zeglin Brand Chair was established in 1996 with a gift from Dale Ellen and Norman Mills Leff of New York City and was the first created in the nation for gender studies. Gender studies at IU was born of the women's studies program, established in the late 1960s and known as the nation's oldest such academic program.
The chair is named for Peg Zeglin Brand, assistant professor of gender studies and philosophy at IU and wife of IU President Myles Brand.
(DeAnna Hines, 812-855-0850, djhines@indiana.edu or Susan Williams, 812-855-0094, sulwilli@indiana.edu)