While her husband was in graduate school, Ms. Potash found Dr. Ross, a staff psychiatrist in the MIT Medical Department. I had no hope, no vision for myself. I was caught between not wanting to continue like I was, and not thinking there was any other way to be. Yet this is a way of life to increasing numbers of women and men of all backgrounds and nationalities. Experts estimate that 5 percent of adolescent and adult women and 1 percent of men have anorexia, bulimia or a binge-eating disorder.
Magazines describe teen-aged girls gathering in social groups to binge and purge.
The number of cases of anorexia has doubled in the past two decades, reaching the highest level since the disease was labeled in the 1800s. Some of this rise may reflect an increase in awareness, and some an increase in incidence. While those figures are disturbing, there are even more people who are not clinically diagnosed with an eating disorder, but for whom food is a serious, preoccupying issue. They are difficult to diagnose because bulimic patients feel shame, and want to hide their symptoms, and anorexic patients honestly do not think there is anything wrong with them. Dr. Ross explained that the outward symptoms are only markers for the real problem, which has much more to do with sense of self than it does with food.