Control Freak/Control Freaks

The claim that eating disorders (EDs) are about control has been repeated so frequently that it has become a truism. However, because the concept of control is rarely defined or operationalized in discourses about EDs, there are ongoing limitations to its explanatory power in everyday and clinical settings. Recently, critical scholars have also acknowledged that accentuating control framings without specifying what people who are socialized as ED patients seek to control can have deleterious implications for how we are perceived and our institutional trajectories (Branley-Bell et al., 2023). Therefore, with this piece, I hope to offer some conceptual clarity about what it could mean to refer to control as a key element of EDs, particularly for those who are diagnosed with co-occurring obsessive compulsive symptoms. My desire in doing so is not to reify ED and other psychiatric diagnostic categories. Rather, it is to propose that the pursuit of control through eating rules and rituals does not significantly depart from other forms of meaning-making through which western societies operate. Though they may represent an intensification or escalation of the impulse to impose order onto constellations of random events, the psyches of many ED patients nonetheless reflect the patterned institutional arrangements that structure all of our daily lives - psychiatry included. To evince this claim, and as an entry into critiquing hegemonic understandings of EDs through a lens of Mad Studies, I will draw from autoethnographic anecdotes to relay how the processes of ED diagnosis and treatment have societal control functions that are similar to the individual control functions of the disorders themselves. They too are attempts to organize and systematize the interminable contradictions of capitalist society - contradictions that are irreconcilable, no matter how valiantly the individual patient or the treatment apparatus they are embedded in tries. As such, I will argue, the symptomology of EDs and treatment for them can be mutually reinforcing in their content and objectives. At worst, treatment can exacerbate eating and related conditions because the expectation of full recovery is an outward manifestation of the internal rigidity that motivates treatment seeking to begin with.