socioeconomic status

Whose Culture is it Anyway? Disentangling Culture and Eating Disorders – Part 6

Andrea 11 Comments

I thought about writing a post about the factor structure of popular eating disorder scales to celebrate my completion of an advanced statistics course in structural equation modelling. When I sat down to read some articles about that, though, I found myself side-tracked– and thoroughly uninterested in deconstructing scale psychometrics. So with a promise to do that at some point, I return to a favourite topic of mine: culture and eating disorders.

When I was writing about culture and eating disorders for the blog last year, I received quite a few requests for articles about eating disorders in developing countries. I suspect that the desire for this kind of article stems from a need to highlight (for the doubters) that eating disorders are serious mental health issues that can impact anyone who is predisposed, regardless of whether they live in a media-saturated landscape or not. As I noted in the … Continue reading →

Eating Disorders & Socioeconomic Status in the Community

Andrea

The assumption that eating disorders only impact young, white, affluent women seems so out dated as to be laughable – and yet somehow this image persists, one of the most prominent stereotypes about eating disorders. It’s a damaging stereotype on so many levels; as we know, stereotypes about who might suffer from an eating disorder can lead people to feel that they don’t actually have an eating disorder and de-legitimizing their distress. The stigma that stems from having a body not expected to have an eating disorder can lead people to avoid seeking treatment out of fear of being dismissed by doctors, not thinking the type of treatment on offer will be appropriate or helpful, and more. Somehow, in the face of this, the image of the privileged and vain young woman who chooses to not eat marches on. And it is a shame.

Researchers are exploring stereotypes such as … Continue reading →

Poverty and Eating Disorders in Hong Kong

Jacqueline

Eating disorders are typically seen as an illness of the middle class, with most patients coming from that socioeconomic group. However, the invisibility of poorer patients within eating disorder research in part reflects the barriers to treatment that they face, including both cost and lower levels of awareness. This paper, written by a Hong Kong social work professor, Joyce Ma, focuses less on the process of eating disorder recovery, highlighting instead the context of treatment. She discusses how family dynamics and socioeconomic status come into play in her encounters with 7 Hong Kong teenagers from low-income families.

While her sample size is very small, it reveals a more diverse — and less body image-focused –disease pathway than most American studies, with Ma breaking down the precipitating factors as follows (patient numbers in brackets):

  • Constipation (1)
  • Desire to be thin (3, 7)
  • Relationship issues (6)
  • Parental conflicts (5)
  • Poverty (2, 4)
… Continue reading →

Can Socioeconomic Status Predict Mental Health Literacy?

Tetyana 3 Comments

Is there an association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mental health literacy? Can we predict the extent of an individual’s knowledge about mental disorders based on how much money they make, how much education they’ve received, or how far up the career ladder they’ve climbed?

That is the question that Olaf von dem Knesebeck and colleagues attempted to answer in a paper published recently in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 

The authors interviewed 2,014 men and women, residents of two German cities Hamburg and Munich, using a telephone survey. The split is roughly 50/50 between men and women respondents and the mean age was 47.5. The authors presented each interviewee with two vignettes out of three (one on depression, one on schizophrenia, and one on eating disorders).

The gender in the depression and schizophrenia vignettes was varied 50/50 between male and female patients, but all vignettes about eating … Continue reading →