Paper short abstract:

Engaging with both anorexia and psychosis, this paper explores lived temporalities of illness and recovery in mental ill-health. It asks whether a desire to maintain anorexia amongst some individuals suggests that it should be reconsidered in light of a paradigm of recovery as living well with illness.

Paper long abstract:

Survivor-led discussions of mental ill-health have increasingly challenged and reconfigured paradigms and practices in UK mental healthcare. This has led, specifically, to a reframing of recovery; in relation to psychosis in particular, this has moved away from binaries of 'cure' and 'chronicity' towards a person-centred approach that emphasises living well with illness rather than the eradication of symptoms such as voice hearing.

A pervasive clinical and cultural understanding of anorexia as centrally about the body has disconnected eating disorders from this new recovery paradigm, and also from the interrelated recognition of the complex relationships between painful life events and mental illness. Yet accounts of being 'looked after' by anorexia demonstrate that this illness may be a simultaneous response and solution to distress, which some individuals desire to maintain. This elucidates the painful logic of wanting to be 'left alone' to 'quietly starve,' as one informant, Chloe put it.

Thus, by engaging with narratives of anorexia, alongside those of individuals with psychosis, this paper considers whether eating disorders should be reconsidered in relation to the newer paradigm of recovery. It asks what the ethical and human implications of such a rethinking might be, and what forms of care it would mobilise. As such, an anthropological attention to the lived temporalities of anorexia offers insights into the politics, uncertainties and intimacies of 'recovery'. It invites an urgent, situated, and sensitive revisiting of concepts such as health, illness and 'chronicity' as these are lived, navigated and challenged by individuals themselves.