BYLINE: Joanne Hichens
With Donatella Versace's public acknowledgement that her daughter, Allegra, has anorexia, the disorder is again in the spotlight.
Once more calls are made for the fashion industry, and Haute Couture designers of wildly impractical clothes worn for show by rail-thin models, to take a stand against the abuse of the body as girls and women try to achieve "size-zero", the dress-size with a waistline to fit an eight-year-old.
Although there's no doubt that the fashion industry and media fuel the desire to be thinner, the causes of eating disorders lie far deeper than exposure to images of skinny celebs and ultra-thin super-models.
Eating disorders are characterised by the need to "use" food, either by bingeing and purging, or starving, as a means to suppress pain and anger, or whichever unbearable underlying feelings exist that cannot be faced in reality. Anorexia in particular is sustained by the irrational obsession with thinness, and the distorted view of the body as fat, no matter how underweight the sufferer …
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