Culture, constitution, motivation and the mysterious rise of bulimia nervosa
✍ Scribed by Bob Palmer
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 54 KB
- Volume
- 6
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-4133
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
There is something of a mystery attached to the emergence and recognition of the syndrome of bulimia nervosa at normal body weight about 20 years ago. In 1970, the disorder was not known as such. By 1990, it seemed to be everywhere. Why did the disorder emerge when it did and in the way that it did? What follows is a highly speculative answer to that question.
The classic paper by Gerald Russell which named bulimia nervosa was published in 1979 and described the new disorder as an ominous variant of anorexia nervosa . Indeed, the patients described in it had been collected in the context of a famous tertiary referral centre for the latter disorder. Many of Russell's subjects were still at low weight or had been so in the past and indeed had had anorexia nervosa in its classic abstinent form. Of course, bulimia as a symptom within anorexia nervosa was already well recognized. Even very early reports of anorexia nervosa had noted the possibility of bulimic overeating and 20 years ago its signi®cance had begun to be de®ned (Gar®nkel et al., 1980). What was novel in Russell's paper was the clear de®nition of a syndrome which could occur at normal weight. Of course, nothing is entirely new. People had been problematically overeating throughout history. Indeed, odd cases of something very like what would now be called bulimia nervosa had been noted from time to time (Parry-Jones and Parry-Jones 1995). However, it seems that it was not until the 1970s that clinicians began noticing signi®cant numbers of people at normal weight whose eating seemed out of control and who felt driven to binge and then compensate by vomiting or other means ). Russell's paper gave full recognition and a name to their condition. Bulimia nervosa was born.