Were you the first child psychiatrist in Spain?
At the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, ??we were pioneers in the specialty in the sixties, when 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.
Which has been in his… 60 years: bravo! of medical practice the most common disease?
Eating disorders gave the impetus to the specialty. Until then, child psychiatry was limited to treating autism and disabilities.
Was anorexia so widespread?
It began to become widespread in the 1970s and became an epidemic…
Wasn’t there anorexia before?
There were eating disorders, but not typified… And they haven’t stopped growing.
What is social – cult of the body – has become an individual pathology: torture it?
This pathology has always existed, as evidenced by monographs documenting anorexia nervosa in the 14th and 17th centuries. For example, there is Catherine of Siena, who only ate herbs, who vomited, despite the fact that the bishop asked her to eat…
Was his holiness a mental disorder?
And he founded a religious order, like a good anorexic, rigidly and obsessively. Another 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 religious, or did they have a genetic predisposition?
They had a genetic predisposition, which this religious cultural factor helped manifest until it turned into a disorder.
Today, instead of imitating prints of saints, do they imitate those of stunted top models?
The scheme is the same again; but there are also temporary aggravating factors, such as the pandemic, which has exacerbated these disorders.
Maybe because socialization, human contact, improves these pathologies?
Or makes them worse, it depends. They are disorders highly influenced by cultural factors…
Does skeletal fashion exploit them?
In El cuerpo como delito I explain how female thinness only begins to be considered attractive after the Second World War and becomes the norm in the 1960s… And until now!
Is it a canon imposed by the upper class when everyone could get fat?
In the sixties, you no longer needed to be rich to get fat; but a balanced diet, on the other hand, was beginning to be unaffordable for everyone.
Was anorexia only for the rich?
When we began to diagnose these disorders, already in the seventies, it was the only psychiatric pathology that occurred more in high socioeconomic classes than in low ones.
And did the lower classes imitate them?
From the nineties, anorexia and bulimia became democratized; the poor follow the rich, and are already common in all social classes.
Anorexia is partly inherited. but why do some develop it and others not?
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, in vogue today, which do not have medical reasons, but aesthetic reasons. 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 don’t have an anorexia treatment that works 100%. We manage to cure only 60% of cases, and of the remaining 40%, 20% remain with symptoms and 10% end up 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, is more prevalent and easier 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 boys and a protective factor for girls. 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 seventies, teenagers were surveyed in England and they were concerned about their faces; in the nineties, it was already the belly, hips, ass… In the seventies, they prioritized only what was visible. Do you know which country has the most cosmetic surgeries?
To Miami, Florida… Spain?
In Iran, but only of the face, teeth and hands.
How many women die of anorexia?
7% of the patients, and half, by suicide. An anorexic is absolutely unhappy and lives a terrible life.
Does anorexia encourage the display of extreme thinness?
Questioning this canon of rickets and its tortured diets and encouraging aesthetic diversity helps us to save them.
