Eating Disorders Thrive In Anxious Times, And Pose A Lethal Threat

|

September 8th, 2020

A recent survey found 62% of people in the U.S. with anorexia experienced a worsening of symptoms after the pandemic hit. And nearly a third of Americans with binge-eating disorder, which is far more common, reported an increase in episodes.

Boogich / Getty Images

For most of her 34 years, Stephanie Parker didn’t recognize she had an eating disorder.

At age 6, she recalls, she stopped eating and drinking at school — behavior that won her mother’s praise. “It could have started sooner; I just don’t have the memory,” says Parker. In middle school, she ate abnormally large quantities, then starved herself again in the years after.

This spring, it all came to a head: She was confined and alone in her New York City studio apartment, as COVID-19 ripped through the city. The pandemic fomented fear and, for Parker, called up past trauma and aggravated the obsessive compulsive disorder that had started to become apparent years earlier. She realized then her relationship with food was life-threatening.

Top Stories