Rethinking Eating Disorders In Mental Health: Culture, Care, and Social Justice

Eating disorders are increasingly framed within mental health policy as issues of early intervention, individual responsibility, and evidence-based treatment. While these approaches have expanded recognition and provision, they raise questions about how eating distress is understood, diagnosed, and managed. This session invites sociological contributions that interrogate the relationship between embodied experience and the policy frameworks that seek to define and respond to it.

Submissions may explore how eating disorders are lived through the body and everyday routines, and how these experiences are interpreted, classified, and transformed into knowledge by psychiatry, research, media, families, and lived-experience communities. Papers that include or engage with lived experience—such as narrative, participatory, or co-produced approaches—are welcome, alongside more traditional academic analyses.

The session also encourages contributions that situate eating disorders within wider global political and economic changes. These may include shifting food environments, austerity, gender and social inequality, changing labour conditions, and the expansion of digital cultures, and how such contexts shape both the prevalence and experience of disordered eating.

Papers may examine how policy discourses emphasise self-regulation, risk, and recovery, often aligning with neoliberal expectations of personal responsibility. Such framings can obscure structural inequities and broader issues of social and epistemic justice, while reinforcing processes of medicalisation and particular diagnostic priorities.

Contributions addressing stigma, classification, and contested forms of knowledge are welcome, and analyses of tensions between policy frameworks and lived experience.

Qualitative, critical, and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged.