Intersectional Perspectives of Eating Disorders
Understanding the symptom as an expression of intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural experience
Recorded Saturday 11 February 2023
With Dr Mazella Fuller, Dr Susie Orbach, Kerrie Jones, Romy Wakil and Dr Charlynn Small, Chaired by Karen Carberry
CPD Credits: 3.5 hours
This conference will provide a bridge to help pause, reflect, apply interventions, and discuss ways of being, in order to help circumnavigate and decolonize the system in which the eating disordered client is being treated.The conference will aim to provide both clients and therapists support to better collaborate relationally, and equip the reflexive practitioner with culturally competent skills to enhance clinical practice.
READ MORE...Forty years on from the iconic ‘Fat Is a Feminist Issue’ by Dr Susie Orbach, and the grounding breaking 2021 tome, Black Women with Eating Disorders: A Clinicians guide by Dr Charlynn Small and Dr Mazella Fuller, the stage is set for an exploration into the symbiotic relationship between eating disorders and its competing rhetoric on the body image of white, black, brown, and indigenous, people of colour. We will consider notions of what is considered to be normal regarding acceptable body types, and colourism, often characterised by media, research, therapeutic treatment, and through the client’s own lived experience. This essentially posits the question, whose body matters in the treatment of eating disorders?
The origins of fat phobia; historical impact of feminism from a black and white perspective is unpacked in research, and storytelling, often unearthing fetishizing of women, amplified through the clients racialised and lived experiences before, during and throughout the treatment process.
SPEAKERS
Dr Mazella Fuller, Dr Susie Orbach, Dr Charlynn Small, Karen Carberry, Kerrie Jones, Romy Wakil, ,FULL PROGRAMME
Programme
Kerrie Jones and Romy Wakil
“See me” – The importance of anti-oppressive care in providing holistic cross-cultural treatment of Eating Disorders
The treatment of Eating Disorders is predominantly led through a white Western lens and consequently heavily informed by the psychiatric model of treatment. The function of an Eating Disorder serves to protect, camouflage and soothe intergenerational wounds carried within the body. How can deepening our cultural humility help foster a more inclusive and equitable environment to treat people with Eating disorders? How can anti oppressive settings provide culturally competent care in Eating Disorder treatment? This session will be led by a white passing woman of Lebanese heritage who grew up in Cyrpus, and a white woman from the UK.
Q&A
Dr Susie Orbach
Occupying Women’s Bodies
From Rape as a weapon of war, to the striking down of Roe v Wade, the bodies of women are under assault. Using the lens of troubled eating and troubled bodies, we can deepen our understanding of the ways in which women are multiply exploited whether in the clothing factories of Bangladesh or the ever expanding cosmetic, food, diet and surgery industries. Make no mistake; these are not benign endeavours but vicious practices which despoil our bodies and the environment. And yet women strike back to occupy their own bodies daring to challenge the world as it has been given to them.
Q&A
Dr Charlynn Small and Dr Mazella Fuller
Body Image Issues and Eating Disorders in Black Women: Decolonisation of Healthcare and Integrative Wellness Approaches
Despite misconceptions that Black women are protected from disordered eating, research suggests that they suffer from eating disorders (ED) at rates equal to or perhaps even higher than White women. Yet many health care providers fail to recognise these disturbances. Stereotypes create boundaries that thwart the full expression of the unique personhood and identity that we all have the potential to express. Barriers to accessing treatment is also a concern for myriad reasons, including the colonisation of healthcare. This presentation discusses many unique challenges and needs of Black women that make them vulnerable to developing EDs
Q&A
Discussion and Q&A