This week Emily T. Troscianko , Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities , and member of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty at the University of Oxford, writes about anorexia for our series of accounts by experts-by-experience. Emily (pictured above) also contributes to Psychology Today with a blog called A Hunger Artist . If there’s any mental illness that offers the sufferer an illusion of having it all, it’s anorexia. The twin towers of that disingenuous promise are thinness and control, bedfellows familiar from pop psychology and the diet industry. No other mental illness gets under observers’ skins (incomprehension, fear, anger, envy) quite like anorexia, and that’s because none other is quite so physical. And it’s in the interplay between the mental and the physical that the hollowness of anorexia’s illusions gets exposed. In the early days, the heady ‘hunger high’ gets you hooked, the admiring comments about your weight loss keep ...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health