“Some time back - I’m thinking 2025 - The Wall Street Journal ran a column written by a female who identified herself as a former anorexic. If you’re interested, you can easily find it. She called anorexia nervosa a disease. She specifically said it was not a choice.
Well, okay, I completely understand why someone who was once in danger of starving herself to death would not want to believe she was making choices, but what else should one call waking behavior for which there is no physiological correlate? A boondoggle? A squander? A humdrumness?
No hormone, neuro-chemical, gene, or any other biological characteristic or pathogen has been found to be associated with starving oneself. Therefore, anorexia is not a disease. All the evidence points to choice…a very, very bad choice. Anorexia is a way of committing suicide, and as is the case with some people who go on starvation diets and live to tell the tale, some people try to commit suicide by various other means and fail. Is trying to commit suicide not a choice?
When I burst the “My troubled mental state is not the result of choices I’ve made” balloon, it is inevitable that someone will ask, rhetorically, “Why, pray tell, would someone CHOOSE to kill themselves in the most agonizingly slow fashion imaginable?”
Same reason human beings do anything irrational, sociopathic, self-dramatic, narcissistic, and self-destructive: Because of what happened in the Garden—which is NOT, by a long shot, what academic theologians claim—human beings do irrational, sociopathic, self-dramatic, narcissistic, and self-destructive things. Some do these sorts of things more than others. Some actually LIVE in the state described…like, 24/7.
Any other rhetorical questions? No? Good. Let’s move on then.
The fairly common idea that certain dysfunctional behaviors are matters of biology and not, therefore, matters of choice is not new—think the idea, ubiquitously held in days gone by, that criminals and the insane could be identified on the basis of physiology…like, pointy heads. No kidding.
