I report on research I conducted with the charity Beat on reading habits and eating disorders, and link the findings to how my own reading changed with illness and recovery.
An outline of the current evidence for CBT efficacy in eating disorder treatment, including problems with relapse reporting and questionable definitions of remission and recovery.
Is normality for you a shining beacon, a haunting impossibility, a reviled trap, an ironic fiction? In anorexia and recovery from it, it can be all these things at different times.
I analyze the ABA literature to explore whether or not the translation from alcohol addiction to eating disorders results in coherent and constructive principles and practices.
Metaphors shape our language and our thought. Paying attention to them in illness and in health can help us clarify our defaults and experiment with other possibilities.
Lately I’ve begun to wonder whether A Hunger Artist is an awful name for this blog. How do you interpret it? How do I worry you do? How would I like you to?
Having grown up blissfully ignorant about mental illness, you now have a partner whose writing and research center on eating disorders, and your take on it all starts to change.
You lose something valuable. You kick yourself for it. Why do you never congratulate yourself when you don’t lose things? Just how confused are we about the mistakes we make?
As technology helps us live more and more distractedly, it becomes both more important and less likely for us to engage positively with our bodies, as subjects not objects.
While I was giving a recovery talk at an eating disorders clinic, one of the patients asked whether I disagreed with her medical treatment plan. I said yes. Should I not have?
At the heart of 'clean eating' is a potent metaphor. It's worth taking a long hard look at its threats and promises and the rest of its dangerous box of cognitive tricks.
Anorexia turns people into less nice versions of themselves. What does this mean, exactly, and does that nicer person you used to be really resurface during recovery?
Can an eating disorder, even years after recovery, carry on affecting how we think about the possibility of having children? If so, how? Can we ever really tell?
A Hunger Artist explores what it's like to have anorexia nervosa and to recover from it, emphasising in particular the powerful interconnections between the sufferer's physical and psychological states. The blog discusses recent directions in clinical research on eating disorders, analyses some of the paradoxes and vicious circles that characterise this dangerous mental and physical illness, and connects eating disorders with current sociocultural trends and with personal factors like relationships, work/study, and sport.
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