Were you the first child psychiatrist in Spain?
At the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona we were pioneers in the specialty in the sixties, and it did not exist. In fact, they have just included it in the MIR.
And who then treated children with mental disorders?
Well, we tried to sneak them into psychiatry as if they were adults.
What has he been in his… 60 years: bravo! of medical praxis the most common ailment?
The impulse to the specialty was given by eating behavior disorders. Until then, child psychiatry was limited to treating autism and disabilities.
How widespread was anorexia?
It began to spread in the 1970s and gradually became an epidemic…
Before there was no anorexia?
There were eating disorders, but not typified… And they have not stopped growing.
Has the social –cult of the body– become an individual pathology: to torture it?
This pathology has always existed, as demonstrated by monographs documenting anorexia nervosa in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, that of Saint Catherine of Siena, who only ate herbs, which she vomited, despite the fact that the bishop asked her to eat…
Was his holiness a mental disorder?
And she founded a religious order, like a good anorexic, in a rigid and obsessive way. Other 150 cases are also rigorously documented, which were considered penitential fasts, so much so that some died fasting.
Did they follow a cultural norm, in this case a religious one, or did they have a genetic predisposition?
They had a genetic predisposition, which this religious cultural factor helped to manifest until it became a disorder.
Today, instead of imitating little saints, do you imitate those of rickety top-models?
The scheme is the same again; but there are also temporary aggravating factors, such as the pandemic, which have exacerbated these disorders.
Perhaps because socialization, human contact, improves these pathologies?
Or makes them worse, it depends. They are disorders highly influenced by cultural factors…
Does skeleton fashion exploit them?
In The Body as a Crime, I explain how feminine thinness only began to be considered attractive after World War II?and became the norm in the sixties… And until now!
Is it a canon imposed by the upper class when everyone could already gain weight?
In the sixties, to get fat you no longer had to be rich; but a balanced diet, on the other hand, was beginning to not be affordable for everyone.
Was anorexia only for the rich?
When we began to diagnose these disorders, already in the seventies, of the psychiatric pathologies it was the only one that occurred more in high socioeconomic classes than in low ones.
And the lower classes were imitating them?
Starting in the 1990s, anorexia and bulimia became democratized; the poor follow the rich, and they are already common in all social classes.
Anorexia is partly inherited; But why do some develop it and others don’t?
65% of the risk is genetic and usually manifests itself in anorexia or bulimia when culturally influenced diets are started…
What diets are you referring to?
To restrictive diets, today in vogue, which do not have medical reasons, but aesthetic ones. By following them, the genetic predisposition to eating disorders is triggered: bulimia or anorexia and bulimia without vomiting or binge eating.
Can they be cured?
We do not have an anorexia treatment that works 100%. We managed to cure only 60% of cases and of the remaining 40%, 20 remain with symptoms and 10% end up being chronic.
Is anorexia more difficult to treat?
The anorexic is austere and hyper-controlled; the bulimic, on the other hand, is uncontrolled and impulsive. Bulimia, yes, it is more prevalent and easy to treat, today even with drugs.
Are there more anorexic girls than boys?
There are more bulimic boys than girls, and in anorexia it happens the other way around; Homosexuality is a risk factor for the boy and a protection factor for the girl. In boys, we find hypermuscular anorexia or vigorexia.
To what extent are they diseases of an era: of a society and its values?
In the 1970s, teenagers in England were surveyed and worried about their faces; in the nineties, it was already the belly, hips, ass… In the seventies, they prioritized only what was seen. Do you know in which country more aesthetic operations are practiced?
In Miami, Florida… in Spain?
In Iran, but only face, teeth and hands.
How many women die of anorexia?
7% of the patients, and half, due to suicide. An anorexic is absolutely unhappy and lives a terrible life.
Does display of extreme thinness encourage anorexia?
Questioning this canon of rickets and their tortured diets and promoting aesthetic diversity helps us to save them.
