BOSTON, Mass. — Instability, lack of structure, too much food, too little food -- these are all factors that help explain why eating disorders thrived during the pandemic, says Johanna Kandel, CEO of the National Alliance for Eating Disorders.
“We all in the eating disorder community had this moment of holding our breath when the pandemic started,” Kandel said. “What we ended up seeing: not only individuals experiencing eating disorders for the first time but people that had been in recovery that were relapsing into their eating disorder.”
Since the pandemic began, the Alliance has seen a huge increase in those seeking help.
“There was this global feeling of loss of control,” Kandel said. “No one knew what was happening. You know at the beginning we thought it was going to be two weeks and we were going to be out.”
More than two years later and new research suggests the number of those with eating disorders continues to grow. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked emergency department data since 2020 from 71 percent of the nation’s hospitals, and found adolescents, in particular adolescent girls, increasingly seeking emergency help for such things as anorexia and bulimia.
“We saw that visits with eating disorders doubled among adolescent females, visits with tic disorders tripled,” said Lakshmi Radhakrishnan, MPH, a CDC research scientist and one of the co-authors of the study, which appears in the latest edition of MMWR.
And the data suggest things got worse for adolescent females as the pandemic wore on. In 2020, the researchers found increased ED visits for two of nine mental health conditions. By January 2022, they saw increases for five of nine conditions.
Oddly, though, Emergency Department visits by boys for the same mental health conditions -- declined.
“Starting in March 2020, we see a dip in visits in this demographic that never quite recover to pre-pandemic base line, even as of January 2022,” said Radhakrishnan.
While the CDC study shows what happened during the pandemic with eating disorder emergency visits, it cannot say why. Still, Radhakrishnan said it does suggest where resources ought to be targeted -- now and in the future.
“Systemic changes that increase access to available tools for mental health among children and adolescents are critical particularly during and after a crisis,” she said. “An expansion of evidence based intervention strategies among adolescent females are critical given the findings that support a greater need in this demographic.”
But Kandel, who struggled with anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating disorder for 10 years, said the CDC’s findings should not mislead anyone into thinking males don’t suffer from eating disorders, too.
“When people think ‘eating disorders’ they think of females -- of young girls,” she said. “When we see eating disorders among every age group, every gender.”
NATIONAL EATING DISORDERS AWARENESS WEEK RUNS FROM FEBRUARY 21-27, 2022. February 25-27, NAED will host “Not One More Weekend,” an event which raises money for the organization’s free, therapist-led virtual eating disorder support groups. FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com/events/#national
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