Deconstructing the “Eating Disorder Epidemic”

In this presentation, I explain why the so called “eating disorder epidemic” is a bio political construct and why an individualistic approach to eating disorders (EDs) is bound to fail. The current focus on disordered eating is as a psychiatric or medical pathology. However, as I argue in this paper, multiple factors including changing food landscapes, globalisation and colonial legacies, over-emphasis on subjectivity and self-cultivation, idealistic representations of bodies, socioeconomic inequalities, the expansion of fast-food industries, the “war on fat, healthism and body extremism, and the algorithms of social media, are all instrumental in the construction of disordered eating. Socioeconomic disadvantage is now recognised as a fundamental determinant of mental health outcomes (WHO, 2024), yet emphasis on individual diagnosis has led to a blurring out of the structural conditions and institutions of power in favor of individualistic, behavioral solutions. Along with various processes by which bodies are medically defined as normal or deviant in their appearance or eating practices, the sociology of the body highlights how human bodies have become the subjects and objects of social and technological control in unprecedented ways. What Rose (1998) calls the “regime of the self” includes the prospect of self-invention, such that we are led to believe that our bodies can be anything we choose, so long as we can pay for it. That epidemiologically eating disorders continue to expand should challenge society to rethink the process of psychiatric labeling and diagnosis, along with the messages that capitalism perpetuates concerning the requirement to achieve an ideal body through diet. The expansion and broadening of ED categories to incorporate people of all ethnicities, genders and backgrounds means that that now exist within a wider picture of intersectionality, that has yet to be fully investigated.