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Joanna Schroeder investigates the prevalence and causes of the increasing numbers of boys and men battling eating disorders, as well as the social stigma associated with what was once thought to be a “girls’ disease.”
It’s not surprising that body image issues are becoming more prevalent with boys than ever before. Male images seem to be more sexualized, and more nude than I can recall ever seeing them. While once guys who were somewhat “average”—like Cary Grant or James Stewart—were lauded as being the physical ideal in their dapper tuxes or well-tailored suits, now we have many more guys like David Beckham appearing on national TV during family-friendly hours wearing almost nothing.
Nudity isn’t the problem, but the idealization of an almost unattainable physical image, like Beckham’s, may be a part of it. Top that with an incredibly competitive academic environment for teens wherein they’re required to be “perfect” in ways those of us who are parents now probably never experienced, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. According to the NBC Nightly News (video, above), Dr. James Lock believes there is a quest for perfection, in both boys and girls, that contributes strongly to the disease. He says he rarely sees a patient with Anorexia in his office who doesn’t have straight As and excel in sports.
Portland’s KGW.com profiled one such young man, Eric Lagerstrom, as an example of the new face of anorexia:
“I’d get comments like, ‘Hey, that was a really good time, maybe if you’d drop 10 pounds think about how fast you’d be.’ It went from I need to get lighter to get faster, to [being] fixated on lighter.”
Eric began eating less than half of what he needed and ramped up his workouts to seven days a week, sometimes twice a day. In just five months, “the weight started just flying off.”
He dropped 45 pounds. From 180 to 135.
“It just kinda went out of control. It became a challenge to walk up stairs.”
He tried to stop.
“As much as I would stand there, wanting to, there was an equally if not stronger force inside that wouldnt let me do it.”
…”They diagnosed him to be one step away from cardiac arrest,” said Eric’s father Joseph as he fought tears.
Finally he admitted the problem to his parents and they found a clinic, the Kartini Clinic in Portland, that understands boys’ unique relationship to eating disorders. The KGW.com story explains further:
“Boys have eating disorders more commonly than we ever thought,” said Kartini Clinic founder, Dr. Julie O’Toole.
Kartini is one of the only eating disorder centers in the world to treat boys. One out of every 10 who walk through the doors will be boys.
“Parents do not cause eating disorders and children do not chose to have them. These are brain disorders. They are highly heritable,” added Dr. O’Toole.
The The highly respected National Eating Disorders Association, NEDA, has a page dedicated specifically to the ways in which eating disorders affect boys and men.
NEDA explains that while approximately only 10% of the cases of eating disorders diagnosed are in males, that still amounts to over one million men and boys who are battling a terrible disease. And of those diagnosed with disorders, 10% will die of their disease.
However, in the NBC Nightly News and MSNBC.com story (video, above) on boys “dying to be thin“, Dr. James Hudson, one of the leading researchers on eating disorders, offers a contradicting figure as to how many males are affected by eating disorders:
“It appears that the prevalence of the disorder is increasing among boys,” said Dr. James Hudson, a Harvard psychiatry professor who has been treating and researching eating disorders for more than 26 years. “It may be that boys are simply more comfortable coming forward now than in the past.”
In 2007, he was the lead author of a large study on eating disorders in the United States, one of the first of its kind. The study found that one in four people suffering from anorexia or bulimia are male, contradicting prior estimates that only 10 percent of people with eating disorders were male.
Regardless of the exact statistics, which will hopefully be clarified over time and with more data, there seems to be a general lack of understanding that boys and men can be afflicted by eating disorders. Because of this, doctors are less likely to refer males for the correct type of diagnosis and treatment.
The MSNBC story quotes Dr. James Lock, who is a psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital:
“Boys don’t get identified… They come later to treatment,” Lock said. “They have therefore had longer time to lose weight so they’re physically sicker. Sometimes that’s allowed the psychological processes to be more reinforced in their own thinking and the behaviors.”
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In the video below, the Kartini Clinic offers one such example of a boy with an eating disorder, and the difficulty his mother faced when trying to figure out how to help her son. As a testament to how the boys who are battling these diseases feel about society’s view of them, the child in the video wished not to be named, as he fears people in his town may not understand that boys can have eating disorders, too.
What do you think are the main impediments to boys and men being treated for eating disorders? Why do you think more boys are being treated now than ever before? Is it more of a willingness to talk about it, or an actual increase in the prevalence of the disease?
To what degree do you believe the media plays a role in encouraging men and boys toward extreme diets and eventually eating disorders?
This video makes my heart hurt. As someone who struggled with an eating disorder for several years and also depression in high school I pray for this poor boy and his mother. The words of that doctor make me SO angry – depression can take so many forms and he should have been taken seriously.