Thanks for your interest!

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I appreciate very much your insightful question about what I call "Eating Disorder Pride."  I'll do my best to give you an answer that is direct and honest, although it may be a bit long-winded.  To begin, I can assure you (as you have asked) that my pride is not in any way an endorsement or encouragement for unhealthy behavior.  I am in recovery, and have been eating in a healthy way since May, 1998.  By "healthy" I mean that I haven't been bingeing or purging or restricting, and my weight is within healthy parameters according to my doctor who sees me regularly. 

Although I am in recovery, I am still very much a bulimic, anorexic, and binge eater in my psychological constitution - that's why I have to keep at it and stay mindful that maintaining healthy behavior requires work on my part.  I do the work, although not always to perfection - but perfection isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway...  As far as I can tell, I'm inwardly an eating disordered person and always will be.  At the same time, my outward behavior is healthy and I'm in recovery - and that's a lot to be proud of.

In recent years, after teaching a lot of classes at IUPUI in which the topic of oppression was a central focus (i.e. - classes on moral and political philosophy, and classes dealing with different concepts of social justice), I've  become convinced that eating disordered people constitute an oppressed group.  Historically, the the term "oppressed" has been used to describe the situation of a group of people whenever members of that group found themselves at some kind of disadvantage relative to other people - solely because they were members of the group. 
There have been many such oppressed groups in American and European history.

Just as an example (and hopefully not too far off topic), it's easy to see that gay people fit this understanding of an oppressed group.  Gay citizens in the US are denied specific legal privileges to which the rest of us have fairly open access (marriage, etc.).  They are not denied this because they are criminals, nor because they are incompetent, but merely because they are gay.  Membership in the group itself accrues a disadvantage. 

Women also constitute an oppressed group on these same grounds.  Women don't receive less pay because they do less work, they receive less pay because they are women.  Women are not underrepresented on the faculty at IUPUI because their scholarship is less than that of men, women are underrepresented because they are women.  That's oppression; disadvantage because one is a member of a group. 

My main point is this: We eating disordered people are most certainly at a disadvantage relative to other people who are suffering from other health conditions.  Research on eating disorders is funded less than any other condition we know of even though eating disorders are known to be more lethal than many other ailments.  Insurance companies deny coverage for us far more than for other people suffering from conditions that are recognized no more or less than ours.  State departments of health ignore us and even promote an increase in the severity of our conditions by way of programs like INShape while at the same time condemning so called "pro-ana" web-sites.  None of these disadvantages and unfair treatments (nor any of the multitude of other disadvantages I haven't mentioned here) that we experience is in any way a product of our specific health condition, they are products of political decisions. 

Is there something weird about anorexia that prevents the National Institute of Mental Health from funding research into a variety of treatment options?  Of course not, their refusal to do this is based on some other criteria.  There's nothing specific about bulimia that prevents insurance companies from covering adequate treatment, they deny coverage for reasons independent of any of the essential features of this disorder.  What all this means to me is that these disadvantages are accrued by us solely because we're eating disordered - and that's oppression just as much as the examples above.  Now I'm no expert on history, but it seems to me that every oppressed group that has been the slightest bit successful in liberating itself has begun this task by finding an inner sense of pride.

The maintenance of oppression depends in large part on robbing those who are oppressed of
their dignity and pride so that they lose the ability to question an unjust social arrangement.  Socially, this is what we call "stigma."  I've felt eating disorder stigma plenty, and I don't like it.  Stigma is a social construct, it indicates that society wants something kept quiet - and it indicates this by placing the subject off limits, making it a cause for shame so that no one will feel comfortable revealing it to another person.  Gays struggled against this stigma for decades to be able to "come out," and they finally put a big dent in the stigma barrier with a full-blown pride movement.

In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated very eloquently that "Segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality because it gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."  At present, there are approximately 3 million anorexic people in the US.  The National Institute of Mental Health states that the mortality rate for anorexia is 5.6 percent per decade, or .56 percent per year (and that's a very conservative estimate, I think).  According to my calculator, .56 percent of 3 million is 16,800 people who die every year from anorexia - and literally nothing is being done by the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institute of Mental Health to so much as acknowledge this horrendous fact, let alone try to help us.  Medically, we're segregated - opportunities for health that are widely available to others are denied us.  And we are stigmatized as well.

I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself, but it seems to me that we need a pride movement.  Not to celebrate illness, but to shake off stigma.  We need to be in people's faces with a blatant lack of fear when we say who we are, we need to demonstrate and protest and insist on equal medical treatment.  That's why I signed my letter the way I did.  It still feels awkward to me to sign a letter that way because I know that here and now my eating disorders are supposed to prevent me from the basic human experiences of pride and dignity.  It's time to present some really serious challenges to this social arrangement, time to change the rules of engagement.  The civil rights amendment got passed.  Gay marriage is on its way.  And we will get there too.

16,800 people a year is a lot of people losing their lives to anorexia.  It doesn't look like the National Institute of Mental Health is going to fight on behalf of the next 16,800 anorexics that will not survive the present year, so it's up to us.  And none of us can do it alone.

So that's my answer to the question you asked me about my pride, and I'm certainly willing to listen to what others have to say about all this too.

Peace,

Chris