Name: 【TEDx】Eating Disorders: Why is it so Hard to Treat Them? | Ilona Kajokiene | TEDxVilnius
Uploaded: 2017-12-23T13:13:00.000Z
Duration: 16 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Galina Mitricheva Reviewer: Denise RQ

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Most of us like food and enjoy eating as a very pleasurable experience.

But sometimes, this relationship  with the food

And I will start from my personal memories.

my very first day  working as a psychologist.

I, as a novice specialist, was sent to talk with a thin, curly, redhead girl.

She was very difficult to relate to, and she bearly spoke,

and she was angry, and I was angry at her.

And all team was annoyed with her as she was sick with anorexia.

she was sent out of the hospital without any noticeable change.

and I remember my own helplessness while working with her.

And the question in my head, "Why it was so hard to treat her?"

Through over 25 years of my career as a psychologist, psychotherapist

The answer is that eating disorders are hard to treat

because actually they are not only about eating.

But if they are not about eating what they are about then?

because it's not just  a simple human behavior, eating,

I would like first to just simply describe you quickly

what do we mean by the title eating disorders.

So it's an umbrella term for usually three mental illnesses.

Anorexia is characterized by a very low weight

It's the most severe eating disorder type

and the highest mortality rate of any mental illnesses.

Bulimia is characterized by a binging and purging behavior:

and unhealthy compensatory behavior afterwards.

This unhealthy behavior could be laxative use, extreme sporting,

could be dieting, and it's there for one reason - the one goal -

just take the control, emotional  and body control back.

The last one is the binge eating disorder.

officially recognized as a mental illness only recently, namely 2013.

And it could be diagnosed in a person who in a very short period of time

swallows huge amount of food without being physically hungry

So after the swallowing  of this amount of food,

I want to stress here that the binge eating disorder

or sometimes like when after holidays we all overeat

especially after Easter  or Christmas, you know that.

And because the person has no compensatory behavior,

it usually goes together  with obesity, too.

As I have mentioned, you could notice that it has psychological and physical issues.

of medical history on eating disorders  and especially anorexia,

- it goes back to the end  of the 17th century -

and zillion research  on eating disorders and other types,

we still don't know how the psychology and biology is interconnected.

So I would turn  to the psychology part first.

Eating disorder is very much about emotions.

could be controlled by starving, or eating, overeating food.

Because of this unbearable state, the person overeats

and this overeating could increase  even an emotional turmoil afterwards.

Second, to have a mental illness means to have a stigma.

And to have a stigma means, in eating disorders, to be a loser,

to be worse than your family members, than your friend, than a loved person,

because nobody wants to be officially recognized as a failure.

And this stigmatization  holds the person from treatment,

and this stigmatization is even more difficult to bear by the male patients.

Because of this stigmatized image of  the eating disorders as a female disease,

the origins of eating disorders were  thought to only be psychological ones.

And this lead to simplification of the understanding,

and this understanding lead to some ineffective treatment

we have lots of myths  about the psychological issues,

and one of them is that parents or the family are responsible

for children developing eating disorder symptoms,

or the social media and cultural attitudes are to be blamed for it.

I followed this particular misconception at the beginning of my career, too.

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【TEDx】Eating Disorders: Why is it so Hard to Treat Them? | Ilona Kajokiene | TEDxVilnius

specific

recognize

mental

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