“That memoir made me think I had failed at my eating disorder because they could go without food longer than I could.” “I learned new tricks—basically how to get better at my eating disorder.” “I got triggered by it.”
Throughout my 17 years as an eating disorders therapist, I have often heard these kinds of comments from patients/clients who had read eating disorder recovery stories. So when people ask if they “should” read them, I usually stress the “at your own risk” element and explain why. Sadly, research gives support to my hesitancy and warning (Shaw & Homewood, 2015; Troscianko, 2018).
Yet, when someone has an eating disorder, it can feel hopeless and isolating. So people often want to find connection and a sense of hope that people can recover. Thus, a recovery memoir seems like a natural match. And though I am not a mind reader, I’m quite sure that most-to-all authors of memoirs don’t intend for their recovery memoirs to negatively trigger readers with eating disorders. Yet they often do. So there’s been a conundrum.
A recent study gets us all closer to determining if and how memoirs can be, at the very least, not harmful.
Emily Troscianko, a researcher and fellow Psychology Today blogger, wrote her own recovery memoir, The Very Hungry Anorexic, and then designed a research protocol to test if it should be published. If no harm, it would........