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What are the causes of bulimia?

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ccording to Lady Di, who was anorexic-bulimic herself, (she purged, self-mutilated, made numerous suicide attempts), the reason for the bulimic addiction is education, because of the social pressures it imposes on children to attain perfection.

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ut today, in 2011, if we still count social pressure among the causes, psychiatrists recognize above all a problem of identity that can be traced to early childhood and that has as its origin in a genetic vulnerability. These genetic and environmental causes influence temperament. They produce an inability to deal with frustrations, with affective relationships. They also predispose people to “depressiveness”, which makes them impossible to develop true self-esteem (only when the emotions are involved). According to Évens Villeneuve, professor of psychiatry in Canada and specialist of severe mental illness.

 

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The media often attributed Lady Di’s bulimia to her romantic disappointments with Prince Charles. In this video, she shares her point of view on bulimia. For her, the cause of bulimia is the pressure that education puts on children to aim for perfection such that they can no longer be themselves.
2_anorexie_humeur What we now realise is that we need to be looking at underlying neural networks in the brain – how patterns of information are processed, how this affects both behaviour and the way an individual reacts to her environment, and why this goes wrong. We need to consider those aspects of how the brain functions that increase the risk of someone falling prey to an eating disorder.” (From the August 7 edition of The Times, Janet Treasure is Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, and head of the Eating Disorders Unit at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust..