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Anorexia Hong Kong Case Study

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Anorexia in Hong Kong Watters starts his case studies with the rise of anorexia in Hong Kong, and how the Western form of anorexia “worms its way into the unconscious minds of a population” (p.48). In the 1990’s there were many political, cultural, and social changes occurring due to the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China. During this apprehensive time, the story of a young girl named Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying and her struggle with self-starvation surfaced and gained attention. The reason Chi-Ying’s story went viral was because she passed away on a public street waiting for the bus because her organs shut down. After this, the Western concept of Anorexia Nervosa, which included self-starvation as a symptom, was introduced and quickly popularized. Once this diagnoses was included in the ‘symptom pool’, many women began expressing this behavior as a ‘cry for help’ in order to bring attention to their own unhappiness and distress (p. 56, 65) MP → The main point that Watters makes in this chapter is that the recognition of a disorder and the rise of public awareness can influence the prevalence of that disorder within a country. Once anorexia was introduced in Japan, there was a massive social transformation in way of unhappiness and distress was portrayed. Similar to the concept of hysteria, anorexia in Japan is socially constructed …show more content…

Debra Wentz was one of many in Sri Lanka during the time of the tsunami and believed the after-effects would result in mental health disaster (p73). Westerner psychologists and psychiatrists were very quick to assume the people of Sri Lanka were going to face sever trauma from this natural disaster and thus needed Western humanitarian and psychological help. With the spread of this assumption, hundreds of Western counselors, psychiatrists, and traumatologists traveled to Sri Lanka to prevent a PTSD

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In “The Globalization of Eating Disorders”, written by Susan Bordo in 2003, the author declares that eating and body disorders have increased rapidly throughout the entire globe. Susan Bordo, attended Carleton University as well as the State University of New York, is a modern feminist philosopher who is very well known for her contributions to the field of cultural studies, especially in ‘body studies’ which grants her the credibility to discuss this rising global issue (www.wikipedia.org, 2015). She was correspondingly a professor of English and Women Studies at the University of Kentucky which gives her the authority to write this article. “The Globalization of Eating Disorders” is written as a preface to her Pulitzer Price-nominated book “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body” which was similarly written in 2003. Through the use of many logical arguments and evidence, Bordo successfully manages to convince her audience that the media, body images and culture have severely influenced the ‘so-called’ trending standard of beauty and how it leads to eating disorders across the world.

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The idea of an emaciated body has strictly been found to be a modern phenomenon, with its first occurrences coming from 1963 when George Balanchine began to mold his company’s dancers to fit his “ideal” ballet body type. This included the look of long legs, flat chested, and having an overall skinny appearance of the girl. These conditions have carried throughout the years and have driven multitudes of ballet dancers to force themselves to the point of heavy dieting, starvation, and forced vomiting to try and fit these attributes. These overlying characteristics of eating disorders have been found in adolescent girls even if they were not involved in ballet. Studies have shown, however, that there is a increase of eating disorders within girls who do participate in the art form.

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Anorexia applied to every little aspect in her life, which is where it differs from anorexics who are only worried about food. She found herself counting every calorie that came near her body and digging through encyclopedias for every element in her food. Her new coming skinniness didn’t come from her sister’s nickname of “Sister Infinity Fats” that even her parents joined in on, it merely formed on something Jenny considered a hobby. But her “hobby” became more than that after a while, thinking she would be “condemned to hell” for taking up so much room and felt guilty for eating. As Jenny neared college she desperately filled her schedule with every activity she could fit into her schedule from French club to drama club.

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Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” (Wolf, 67) And so Elizabeth develops an eating disorder. She exercises and changes her eating not to feel better, but to punish herself into a thinner body. “I can already feel the cupcake half doing its worst and I think of how many Lifecycle minute it will take to atone.”

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American Psychiatric Association (1993), “Practice Guidelines for Eating Disorders.” American Journal of Psychiatry, 150 (2), pp 212-228. Arthur-Cameselle, Jessyca N., and Paula A. Quatromoni. " Factors Related to the Onset            of Eating Disorders Reported by Female Collegiate Athletes." Sport Psychologist         25.1 (2011): 1-17.

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