The World’s Deadliest Psychiatric Disorder
Every 62 minutes in the U.S, someone dies as a direct result of this mental illness. Yet the bulk of medical professionals refuse to recognize it as dangerous.
Having an eating disorder is sort of like being the Boy Who Cried Wolf in the arena of mental illness and the associated medical world.
Part of the reason behind this is because they are so rampantly common — there is a wide array of behaviors and habits that are umbrella’d by the eating disorder diagnosis, all of which being susceptible to fluctuation in acuteness based on individual, age, circumstance, and genetic predisposition.
In short, its normal to have disordered eating. Its normal to hate your body and hurt yourself to try to change it, so long as that disordered eating doesn’t turn into an eating disorder.
At least, that’s how society views it. And more importantly, that’s how the bulk of medical professionals view it as well.
Yet the line between the human foible of self loathing and a diagnosable disorder is so blurred and vague, the mental illness goes untreated and, even if diagnosed, not recognized as an actual threat to the individuals health.
