Eating disorders

Abstract

AbstractOver recent decades there has been a shift away from cultural and interpersonal towards genetic, metabolic, and neurobiological understandings of eating disorders (EDs). This has gone some way to redress the tendency to minimize and trivialize this group of serious mental illnesses in research, clinical practice, and society. Over the same period, however, new sociocultural influences that play a potential role in aetiology and maintenance have emerged, resulting in changes in epidemiology, classification, and understanding, and providing new theories of gene–environment interaction. These include an increase in EDs in men and sexual minorities, recognition of EDs in a range of ethnicities and cultures, increases in obesity at a population level and public health efforts to address it, which impact on EDs, and the role of globalization and social media on the Westernization of cultures previously unexposed to the thin ideal. In this chapter, how these, as well as intra-familial and interpersonal factors, interplay in the onset of EDs are examined, and further research in low- and middle-income countries, in marginalized populations such as children or older people, and of epigenetic phenomena, is called for to help further our understanding of how biological and social risk factors interact in the causation, prevention, treatment, and outcome of EDs.