Eating Disorders: Do I Have An Eating Disorder

Saturday 20 October 2012

Do I Have An Eating Disorder

In the late 1800s, the curtain was about to rise on modern conceptions of anxiety. Victorians were beginning to get a glimpse of a new world, a world characterized by radical transformations, such as the telegraph, new theories of evolution and religion, telephones, light bulbs, elevators, and new forms of transportation. Such transformations seemed to produce a special kind of fear, a fear that we might call today general anxiety. Among burgeoning attention to the study of “mental states,” such as William James’ seminal work Principles of Psychology and Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind, Victorian doctors increasingly noted a rise in a previously obscure disorder called “hysteria.”Hysteria, from the Greek hysterikos (“of the womb”) was mainly associated with women and was indeed thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus (Stacey 2002). The symptoms, mostly exhibited by women, were physical, but they also seemed to be linked to psychological factors and emotional distress. Increasingly, hysteria was seen as a type of social illness that was directly related to the needs and style of the era. In fact, soon after the turn of the century, cases of hysteria declined as social transformations were established, including significant changes in the status of women (Gordon 2000).