Anorexia is like an OCD in that not eating is self-soothing to the anorexic. It's also an addiction in that you become addicted to starvation. Anorexia wards now are autism friendly so patients can have more control over their meals. The tests for autism are really geared towards little boys and little girls are better at mimicking social cues. So there's been a theory around for a few decades that anorexia is a female version of autism.
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, Hadley Freeman stopped eating. From the age of fourteen to seventeen, she lived in various psychiatric wards with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. And for the next decade, the condition would revisit and interrupt her life in numerous ways. In conversation with journalist Bari Weiss and drawing on her new book Good Girls, Freeman recounts her harrowing account of this complex condition.
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