Culture and Eating Disorders

Many cases in my practice illustrate the relationship between culture and eating disorders. One Ethiopian girl fleeing from civil war in her country had been sent to a preparatory school in the U.S. Gradually, she found herself unable to eat. She spent her days sipping water. She denied that the famine and drought in Ethiopia and the sight of the emaciated bodies, which were daily being shown on television, had anything to do with her eating disorder. A young woman from Cambodia had spent her early years in a refugee camp there. After years of trauma induced by war and relocation and after spending several years in the United States she too became unable to eat. An affluent African American girl whose mother was president of a prestigious university became anorexic in high school after years of feeling secondary to her parents' professional work. She was overcome with anxiety about her future. She felt the implicit mandate was for her to achieve at a very high level, but she felt unable to do so. What could she do, she wondered, to surpass her parents? Restrictive eating became her "achievement." For many Latin women, especially middle and upper class women, anorexia nervosa can be related to traditional cultural norms of femininity and expectations of beautification. For each of these clients, cultural factors were an important place in the multi-dimensional problem of an eating disorder.

By: Patricia Romney Ph.D