This paper is a discussion of Peggy Claude-Pierre's book, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders. Claude-Pierre is a specialist in the outpatient treatment of individuals suffering from anorexia and bulimia, two extreme and little-understood psychological conditions that have traditionally been considered to be problems primarily for girls and young women, precipitated by their unreasonable reactions to societal demands of physical perfection. Claude-Pierre suggests that, because these disorders have been considered to be women's problems and to be primarily consciously motivated, they have not been studied with the same seriousness they would have been accorded had they been seen to strike an equal number of men. Instead, Claude-Pierre argues, anorexia and bulimia can strike all ages and both genders, and each disorder is a form of slow suicide in response to an overwhelming psychological condition that has very little to do with being female in America.
Claude-Pierre first started to study anorexia when her oldest daughter began suffering from the condition. She found, "Much of what is commonly presumed about eating disorders is largely mistaken or touches only on a superficial level of understanding" (6). One of the most devastating presumptions made by the medical community was that anorexia is incurable and likely to result in death. Because doctors believed they could not help anorexics, their care often consisted of preparing the family for the patient's inevitable death.
Many professionals also viewed anorexia and bulimia as excessive responses by adolescent girls to a society that glorifies rail-thin models as the ideal female body type. Claude-Pierre writes, "Eating disorders are often construed as simple vanity taken to an extreme" (3). Although she acknowledges that social pressures do in fact put many unrealistic demands on people, especially impressionable adolescents, she disagrees strongly with the a...