Virtue and Disease: Narrative Accounts of Orthorexia Nervosa

Abstract

Orthorexia nervosa is most frequently described as a fixation with healthy eating. Although orthorexia nervosa (ON) has yet to be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and much debate persists as to its prevalence and criteria for its diagnosis, many mental health clinicians have observed the growing prevalence of the condition. However, the contemporary imperative in the United States to “care for” one’s body through food, which includes the employment of nutritional knowledge and often the identification of “good” and “bad” foods, the diagnostic criteria for orthorexia reflect what are, to some degree, normalised, even valorised, approaches to food in American society. This chapter explores contestation over the production of orthorexia as a disease within medical and lay discourses. This essay also considers how self-identified recovering orthorexics make use of both the contested diagnosis criteria and the contested condition itself in narrating the trajectories of their experiences. Given that ON's existence is still debated and that solid empirical data on its prevalence is lacking, these authors play an important role in normalising the notion that healthful eating can become unhealthy.