Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating in Different Cultures

Abstract

Clinical experience and research have moved the field toward greater recognition and differentiation of eating disorders as independent categories of mental disorder. Shorter's historical analysis, however, suggests that it may be useful to reconsider the relationship of AN and BN to the broader class of somatoform disorders. Also, by conferring legitimacy on this socially and culturally constructed disorder, mental health professionals may have seriously underestimated their unanticipated influence in propagating eating disorders with publicity aimed at preventing and curing them. Inasmuch as it offers an alternative or complement to the prevailing cultural hypothesis, which focuses on the effect of Western esthetics rather than the sociology of health care institutions, and has important implications for policy and publicity about eating disorders, the question of how culture and Westernization affect the epidemiology and experience of eating disorders also requires further study.