Self, brain and illness : a qualitative study of illness representations in anorexia nervosa

Abstract

Anorexia Nervosa is a serious disorder, affecting between 0,5 and 1% of girls and young women (12-23 years of age) but rarer in males. Currently, a clear understanding of the aetiology remains elusive, thus recent research has expanded the focus to include factors such as neurobiology. Such a research focus could lead to a new understanding of AN as a brain based illness, changing the focus from the socio-cultural model of understanding illness to a more biological one. However little is known about the impact of these developments upon society’s attitude to eating disorders and on the sufferer’s experience and understanding of their illness. Employing qualitative interviewing and thematic analysis, the present study reports on how teenage girls with AN understand their illness, their participating in research, and their motivation for such participation. The identified themes were: searching for knowledge, understanding causes, finding a biomarker, problems within ourselves or outside ourselves and family literacy. The main reason for participating in brain-based research was the wish to contribute to the gaining of knowledge. The main effects of undergoing scanning were giving the patients the sense that they had a better understanding of their illness and the sense that they were not to blame for their illness. There is a desire among the participants to understand more about the illness and to find a marker for it, that would function as a justification that AN is a serious illness not something provoked by the sufferer who is not to be blamed for it.