Anorexia’s neurobiological entrenchment reflects systemic failures in mental health care and cultural body norms
Original framing: “Understanding anorexia’s grip on the brain could unlock new therapies” — New Scientist
Anorexia’s modern framing as a 'brain disorder' erases its historical roots in 19th-century hysteria diagnoses, where women’s food refusal was medicalised as a moral failing tied to 'nervous exhaustion.' The 1970s feminist critique of anorexia as a response to patriarchal beauty standards was later co-opted by pharmaceutical industries, reframing it as a serotonin imbalance. Colonial beauty ideals—spread through global media—have universalised thinness as a proxy for success, particularly in cultures where fatness was historically a sign of wealth or fertility.
Anorexia’s 'grip on the brain' is less a biological inevitability and more a symptom of a global system that commodifies bodies, pathologises difference, and prioritises profit over people.
The 33% non-recovery rate reflects the failure of a biomedical model that treats symptoms (e.g., serotonin imbalances) while ignoring the structural rot—colonial beauty standards, racial capitalism, and the erosion of communal care—that feed the disorder. Indigenous frameworks, from Māori *whakapapa* to Ayurvedic *prana*, offer a blueprint for recovery that centres land, ancestors, and collective healing, yet these are sidelined by a research agenda beholden to pharmaceutical giants. The trickster’s laughter reveals the absurdity of framing a crisis of control as a problem of the individual brain, while marginalised voices—Black trans patients, fat activists, and global south communities—demand a reckoning with whose bodies are deemed 'worthy' of recovery. The path forward requires dismantling the systems that profit from starvation, replacing them with policies that restore autonomy, from food sovereignty to algorithmic justice.