BBC NEWS | Health | Anorexia visible with brain scans
Sophisticated scans have revealed the eating disorder anorexia is linked to specific patterns of brain activity.
Even young women recovering from anorexia who have maintained a healthy weight for over a year had vastly different brain activity patterns. The findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry point to a brain region linked to anxiety and perfectionism.
Perfectionism?
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“Perfectionism?”
I suppose ‘perfectly thin’ would be so thin, you couldn’t be seen anymore, which is physically and psychically where anorexia leads.
I know people who act irrationally over trivial matters. And it extends to many facets of their lives. It is not something that can be negotiated or talked away. Their brains are different than normal. There is no search for perfection. There is only a distorted brain.
And right now we don’t quite know what is going wrong.
Perfectionism, because the sufferer has taken to heart, to a pathologically obsessive degree, the idea that being thin is the only possible physical ideal. Applying perfectionistic ideation to that goal results in the goal – being thin “enough” – being always just out of reach, as in “If I just lose another 5 pounds, I’ll be perfect.” But once that 5 pounds is lost, that goalposts move, since “I only have to lose 5 more pounds, and then I’ll be even more perfect.” The end result of this “reasoning” carried to its conclusion is, of course, death.
An irrationally pessimistic and distorted perception of one’s own body + the innate female tendency to seek peer approval and external validation + obsession = anorexia. Reasoning is completely bypassed. The quesion of “why should the opinion of others override all else” is never even entertained. This complete absence of reality testing is why anorexia is virtually nonexistent in women whose IQs are significantly above the (relative to males) narrow normal range for females. That is to say, anorectics are almost invariably of average or below-average intelligence.
Well, don’t look at me like that – you asked!
Anorexia is also usually visible with the naked eye.