Eating Disorders: Personal or Social Problem?

In today's society, there is much attention being given to the subject of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia; unfortunately it is because these disorders seem to be becoming more and more common. The question that remains is whether eating disorders such as these are simply personal problems of the individuals, or if they have become a social problem that needs to be addressed more aggressively. Having grown up in this society, I see this issue as a definite social problem. To say that these increasingly common eating disorders are personal problems, implies that the causes of them are personal as well, which I believe is not the case. A social problem is something that goes against society's goals and values; it would seem to me that being exposed to something that causes a potentially life threatening disease would go against most people's goals. The media in this society increasingly dictates to young women that in order to be desirable, you must be painfully thin with a very specific body type that is unrealistic to most of us. Young women are being pushed into disordered eating in an effort to live up to the media's representation of what women should look like, and this is definitely a social problem.
Anorexia involves depriving oneself of food in order to lose weight, and bulimia is when a person eats, but then forces themselves to vomit up the food they have consumed in hopes of losing weight. The common thread between these two disorders is the end result, weight loss in the most unhealthy of ways. When anorexia goes too far, the person may be hospitalized, as they are starving themselves to death. Though they get so thin that they are unable to get out of bed, they still refuse to eat because they are afraid they will gain weight. If anorexia is not treated the person may go into organ failure and can die. Persons with bulimia often have a great deal of pain as a result of continuously vomiting up stomach acid, which burns away the

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