Moving Beyond "Recovery": Exposing and Disrupting the Eating Dis/Order Industrial Complex

Abstract

In this article, we begin by discussing the historical ideologies and practices that have evolved into the prevailing understandings of ‘eating disorders’ (EDs) and their association with mental illness, psychiatric treatment, and recovery. We argue that psychiatry’s authoritarian control over so-called EDs and the circular reasoning that justifies its questionable efficacy present a paradoxical trap for those labelled as ED. While scholarly critiques of the psychiatric ED monopoly have expanded clinical framings of ED recovery, it is the psychiatric survivor movement that has exposed psychiatry itself as something to recover from. In line with this movement, and moving with Mad Studies, we call for a more radical scholarship that resists prevalent notions of ‘recovery’ and expresses Mad outrage in response to the systemic violence that is perpetuated by psychiatry’s totalitarian control of treatment and recovery. Toward this end, we began the process of curating radical imaginations for a transdisciplinary project to include alternative analyses of ED-related phenomena that expose what we have come to understand as the eating dis/order industrial complex. We conclude by pointing to alternative analyses that we suggest can inform critical eating dis/order studies, drawing from: economics, communication and technology studies, public health, radical dietetics, practitioners, activists, artists, survivors, peace studies, and multi-species studies.