Beyond psychiatry: How social workers conceptualise women and self-starvation

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In the present study, I outline how four social workers, with experience in working with women who self-starve, commonly known as anorexia nervosa, conceptualise this phenomenon. I conducted single, in-depth interviews with each worker and feminist discourse analysis was chosen as the method of text interpretation. Alternative (non-psychiatric) ways of understanding women's self-starvation were explicitly privileged. Hence, the alternative discourses of feminist and poststructural theories were used to design the research and analyse the data. The literature review outlines the historical ‘discovery’ of ‘anorexia nervosa’ as a discrete illness category. Contemporary and dominant ‘pathological’ perspectives and marginalised ‘cultural’ perspectives are presented. Three dominant themes emerged from the interviews. They were ‘control and perfection’, ‘femininity’ and ‘self-destruction/self-preservation’. These themes are presented, as are their critical implications for social work.