I first heard about The Secret Language of Eating Disorders on the TV show 20/20. At the time the author claimed 100% cure rate, and although I’ve since read that some of her former clients relapsed, she still appears to have a remarkably high success rate. If you read the reviews, anorexics say that she understands how they think, that anorexia is a kind of very slow suicide.
Critics point out that she only has a B. A. degree and isn’t scientifically rigorous in her approach, but given the failure of experts to cure this condition, I think those are fairly weak criticisms if she really has had the success she claims.
One Spoonful at a Time by Harriet Brown is the on-line personal story of a mother’s desperate coping with her daughter’s anorexia. She reports using the Maudsley approach in which family members sit with patients at mealtimes calming and encouraging them to eat. Studies show a 90% success rate with this method, and the techniques used sound similar to Claude-Pierre’s approach.
In her article Brown discusses an interesting 1940s study by Dr. Ancel Keys, who put 36 men through a year long study of starvation. Especially during the refeeding phase of Keys’ study, the volunteers became depressed, antisocial, anxious, irritable, and obsessional, just like anorexics. One insight which was learned from this was that the psychology of starvation in the midst of plenty isn’t the same as when there isn’t any food around, which is why you don’t see anorexia in deprived populations.
Risk factors for the condition are: the person is naturally slender, they find it easy to diet, is a perfectionist, lives in the United States, and is in an activity such as ballet which encourages thinness. Finally, one of the reasons why relapse is so common is that once the disease has progressed anorexics become metabolically inefficient, the weight loss becomes self-feeding to some extent, and the patient needs more calories than other people to maintain or gain weight.
