Psychiatry as social ordering: Anorexia nervosa, a paradigm

Helen Gremillion

Social Science & Medicine, 1992, vol. 35, issue 1, 57-71

Abstract: From a psychiatric perspective, anorexia nervosa (hereafter referred to as 'anorexia') is an enigmatic illness. This paper attempts to explain why this is so, describing anorexia as a western cultural phenomenon whose psychiatric explanations and treatments actually participate in the sociocultural processes that inform this syndrome. Anorexia reveals a form of contemporary control over the female body, and psychiatry, as a western discipline, institutionalizes a mind-over-body (objective) ideology that is part of this project. Various psychiatric theories of anorectic etiology and their corresponding methods of treatment are analyzed in this light, and a general framework for understanding the discipline of psychiatry as a mode of social control is offered.

Keywords: anorexia; nervosa; western; psychiatry; gender; body; practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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