Tag Archives: Mental Health

As the Victoria Beckhams of this world have replaced the Marilyn Monroes on the centerfolds of magazines and advertisements selling everything from perfume to real estate, wide social effects have taken place in rich nations. Although size zeros are no heroes, adolescent girls and grown women the world over have succumb to chasing the promised good feel of the thinness ideal. At the extreme, this chase can lead to conditions diagnosed by mental health professionals as binge eating and disordered eating (which includes self-starvation, bingeing, purging and exercising obsessively), leading to more widely known conditions of anorexia (self starvation) and bulimia (regular self-induced cycles of binge-eating and vomiting), found to affect up to 5.7% and 7.3% of women in Western nations respectively (1). Both are addictive psychological attempts to take back control over inputs into the body and sometimes other aspects of life. And both are on the rise in less wealthy countries too as they transition into Western lifestyles brought to them through cultural and corporate marketing transmissions associated with the age of globalisation (2). Read More »

If the old parable is true and you are what you eat, does food affect who we are and what we think? I have previously written about the visible problems associated with poor diets in the world such as obesity, diabetes and food related cancers and the possible starting points for individual and public policy solutions. However, one notable health aspect generally missing from discourse on food policy is that of mental health problems associated with diet. These can include depression, with associated human cost of suicide, and health problems due to malnutrition associated with eating disorders. For example, according to the World Health Organisation “in low-income countries, depression represents almost as large a problem as does malaria (3.2% versus 4.0% of the total disease burden)” and every year 844,000 people commit suicide globally, a staggering 60% rise in the last 45 years. It is a pricey omission too since mental health issues are highly costly to: societies overall through their national health and medical systems; to the private sector through lost days of work; and to individuals through the suffering of depression or the silent, and often unreported and untreated, psychological and physical suffering associated with eating disorders. Mental health disorders cost the UK National Health Service, for instance, an estimated £77bn ($120bnUSD) annually and 77,000 people currently out of work due to mental health problems. Read More »