A young anorexic woman died in Ireland because her psychiatrist mother drowned her daughter in the bath. It's a tragic story of Gothic proportions going back who knows how many generations. The mother couldn't bear the daughter's anorexia. The daughter refused treatment. The mother had an eating disorder. The grandmother committed suicide. The story in "This is London" stops there, but the human story has got to go back who knows how far.
I'm haunted, as many people must be, by the horror, the extremity, the tragedy, the ignorance, the blindness, the waste and the ongoing and spreading suffering of this event.
Eating disorders go deep into our souls. Personally I think that they go deep into the souls of the individual with the disorder and also deep into the soul of our society. Something powerful in our current human condition is bringing up a terrible despair that eating disorders are making public.
If we can a bring thorough recovery to people with eating disorders, and embrace effective ways of preventing anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder and all the rest, we will also be finding a deep cure for the problems in our society that spawn eating disorders.
I hope this sad and profound tragedy will spur people to look more deeply into both the psychological and cultural forces contributing to sustaining eating disorders in our midst.
Wounds of the soul are showing.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
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