Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright

This other side of dieting, this obsession with personal appearance, but also with control, can, and does, have catastrophic consequences. Whether this diet be for medical (as in Wright’s case), or aesthetic reasons it can act as a catalyst for deeper issues surrounding food. How many books or films (disturbingly this trend if often focused at teens) have you encountered that casually discuss, even promote disordered eating patterns, that in the same breath glamourise not eating as a solution to remaining thin and stigmatise over-eating or vomiting as “disgusting”.Įating disorders rarely, if ever, develop without the sufferer first undertaking some form of diet. Noting the unhealthy obsession we hold with both appearance and food obsession (Atkins, paleo, low-carb the list goes on). Wright herself refers to this under the ironic name of sick-lit. Our culture has a disturbing habit of both glamourising and stigmatising eating disorders – in life, film and literature. That in almost every other mental illness, treating the symptoms makes the patient feel better if only in increments…but for us, when we start to eat again…we feel worse, far worse, when we don’t have out hunger to protect us.

My doctors never tire of telling me that we’re the unlucky ones. Eating disorders are serious and sometimes fatal conditions and yet for some reason they are rarely treated as such. These deaths are not just caused my complications from the disorder, sadly many of them are suicides. It has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder with risk of premature death up to 12 times higher than the general population. Not because of the issue she tackles – although eating disorders, like all mental illness, are under discussed and heavily stigmatised – but because of how she writes about it.Įating disorders affect nearly 1 million Australians, Anorexia Nervosa effects up to 1.5% of females and 0.5% of males. I couldn’t see myself as one of ‘those women’ – I thought that eating disorders only happen to women who are vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid it took me years to realise that the very opposite is true, that these diseases affect people, men and women both, who think too much, and feel too keenly, who give too much of themselves to other people.”įiona Wright’s collection of “Essays on Hunger” are unique.

Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright