(no subject)

[phosfate]

"Contrary to a commonly held belief among the dwindling number of Americans who have not been touched by the disease, young people who fall into the grip of anorexia (15 percent of anorexics die of the ailment) are not, for the most part, trying to look like some magazine icon; they're trying to assert some control over a life that they feel is not really theirs."

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/01/17/anorexic/index.html

Comments

[mercyorbemoaned.livejournal.com]

Among girls at my high school, some level of anorexia and bulimia was the norm. The kind of self-indulgent refusal to accept responsibility at appropriate times and then gleeful acquiencence with the dictates of expensive professionals and expensive institutionalization on the part of parents was also the norm. I wanted to smack those parents then and I wanted to smack the guy who wrote that article.

I don't know why it's apparently so fucking hard to figure out that most people cannot tolerate being dumped into completely chaotic, yet coldly institutional morass of dorm life. It's not only bad for people psychically, it is a epidemiolocigal nightmare waiting to happen - except for those people who have already been maimed or killed by bacterial meningitis, for whom the nightmare has already happened. The only social purpose I can see it serving is giving everyone a taste of life under socialism, so they will all turn into rabid defenders of the free market, but oddly that doesn't seem to happen.