Eating
Disorders in
Women and
Children

When I was a young woman being treated for an eating disorder, certain assumptions were made.
If you had an eating disorder, you would be a white adolescent girl from a family with a controlling mother and an absent father. You would display a passive personality and low self-esteem. You
would in all likelihood have signs of depression; whether you did or not, you would probably be
treated for it. Your treatment team would see and treat you as childish and immature, and hold a
variety of vague and often unfounded opinions about who you were, where you’d been, and what
kind of chances of recovery you had. Those chances were considered, almost across the board, very
low indeed.