...I would assume all eating disorders are “anxiety” related. Adolescence (assuming channel seven news can be trusted), is the time of highest anxiety levels across all ages. It is the imperative, children in this stage of development, have sensible stable and trusting family relationships to guide them through the perils that confront them. But according to the survey (re. above) Youth nominated employment and money as the reason for most anxiety; followed closely by unstable relationships second.

...I also think it fair to say, girls would exhibit eating disorders above the males rate, due to the predisposition of sexual predators to abuse girls as a preference in childhood. Extracting that cause of sexual abuse from the equation, would probably level the field between male and females somewhat.
In many ways, government policy is to blame. Keeping children in the protected environment of schools for periods extending well into adulthood,( when considering tertiary education as well), deprives the child of the ability to deal emotionally with the severity of day to day realities of survival.

...I hold great sympathy with youth of today, and wonder why the obvious flaw in the education system, which prevents children from following a normal path of maturity into society is not corrected. Especially when reading newspaper articles last weekend, which highlighted the overall dissatisfaction by uni students in the employment outcomes, after investing the best phase of their youthful life to study.

...Government has a fundamental obligation to assist our youth with medical interventions for anxiety disorders in the short term, but have the greater responsibility towards fixing a broken education system that effectively “jails” our youth in institutions which exhibit little or no benefit at the end, to our youth who are forced to comply with it.

I'd agree Dan, especially with regard to young males, the education system is no place for a boy these days, they should be out working among adults as soon as it's practical.
Are we also overlooking infantilism in so called "men" as a cause of the abuse of young women?
Boys growing up without fathers is another problem, my Dad was an orphan so he had no concept of what fathering meant, thankfully I had several other male role models, maternal uncles, family friends etc with whom I spent the bulk of my time while he was off at work or otherwise avoiding me.
Since what may be termed "Male life skills" are only learned from living among adult men anxiety over simply not knowing how a real man is supposed to behave or how a real man relates to others must be a crushing disability to a lot of young men.
The same can be said of young women who grow up without fathers,they don't know how a real man behaves, how a real man treats women.

The causation for this growing epidemic is not the settings of education and nor is it about family structure. The reason why we are seeing the rise in these anxiety type disorders has to do with the type of society that has developed - a superficial consumerist and competitive market based society whereby we value fashion and artificiality over intelligence or compassion.

Our society is getting more and more selfish and incidentally unhappy. The countries with some of the highest levels of GDP also have some of the highest rates of clinical depression. The reason why people are getting eating disorders is because in this neoclassical and neoliberal capitalist culture we value superficial looks and selfishness.

This is the reason Year 9 students are fasting and dieting - it is because they want to look good. Society says if you do not look thin than you are doomed to be in the "uncool" group. We see in the school yard and we see this in society as a whole.

It has nothing to do with family structure or education settings - teenagers with eating disorders statistically come from the middle to upper classes of affluence, private schooling and financial freedom. There is more pressure on these teenagers to conform and be seen as cool.

An interesting, but worrying article indeed.
Dr. Wallace reiterates what I have also read in medical articles, which is to say that society as a whole reveres the beautiful and the thin and the rich.

Young men and women have such high expectations for themselves, having read what it is supposed to mean to be 'cool' or 'uncool'in the media or on social media sites online or on TV.

Having worked in low dependency psychiatric units in the past, I agree with Dr. Wallace in his assertions that it is not so much those from disadvantaged family environments, or financially disadvantaged young people with eating disorders, but far more likely to be people from middle income families with two parents.

I tended to see more teenagers and young adults from supposedly 'good' or 'normal' families with these dreadful eating disorders than any others.
It is still somewhat of a mystery exactly why that is, other than having high expectations of themselves, or maybe high expectations of them by their parents?

It's not just eating disorders that are a problem - body image issues in young men are far more likely to lead to steroid abuse, with all its associated health problems, in an effort to achieve the muscular image which society portrays as the pinnacle of male beauty.

DR Albert writes

'Our society is getting more and more selfish and incidentally unhappy.'

Kind of destroys the evolution myth that we are evolving into more moral creatures. Bible proves itself right again and again.

runner...

"Kind of destroys the evolution myth that we are evolving into more moral creatures. Bible proves itself right again and again."

Firstly, you need to read The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes by Steven Pinker. By all accounts, conflict and crime has been in decline throughout humanity. Do we conduct witchhunts or burn heretics at the stake or stone adulterous women or support slavery or support racial segregation or cane children any more? Clearly this 21st century is a far more moral time than a century ago, let alone the times of the Bible was written.

Secondly, evolution is not at all myth. I actually have a degree in evolutionary biology and ecology, and I can tell you without a doubt that Darwin's theory of evolution of natural selection is fact. If you deny evolution then you deny fact.

Thirdly, what I meant in my statement that "Our society is getting more and more selfish and incidentally unhappy" is that in neoclassical/neoliberal capitalist postindustrial western societies we are indeed selfish. Go to any hunter gatherer society and you will find a far more egalitarian and peaceful group of people.

Lastly, give me proof that any statement in the Bible is the literal truth and is not meant to be allegorical or as a metaphor. From the mathematical value of Pi to the physical properties of stars to the movement of the sun to the anatomy of insects to the formation of the universe to talking snakes to the single origin of language - the Bible is full of scientific errors. If you take the Bible to be true than you must deal with the immensity of its flaws and immoralities.

Dr. Albert Wallace,

"Our society is getting more and more selfish and incidentally unhappy. The countries with some of the highest levels of GDP also have some of the highest rates of clinical depression. The reason why people are getting eating disorders is because in this neoclassical and neoliberal capitalist culture we value superficial looks and selfishness."

There you have it - well put.

Btw, you'll have you work cut out trying to convince runner of the validity of the theory of evolution.

...It is not helpful to the development of the maturity of the human psychology, to institutionalise children into adulthood. Frontiers and challenges to survival that test the childs concepts of self and its true position in society, are the most critical in the developmental path to full and confident maturity. It should be asked, why our children are excluded and discouraged from involvement and participation in the workforce and confined to the institutionalised and overprotected school system, as a substitute to the greater reality of social involvement in the workforce?

...For the answer to this, we need to look back at least two decades into our industrial history, and discover a pattern developing as Australian industries began their migration to Asia. It makes sense to deduce the connection to this event, and to the rise in the age of school children exponentially to the migration of industry. Society ceased to offer alternatives to longer periods in school for our children.

...The pinnacle of the inevitable failure of the phenomenon exposes itself in the rise in negative mental health outcomes of adolescent immaturity, exposing itself in self-perception misconceptions. I don’t argue against the opportunity the education system offers to children as a “choice”, but rest the argument on the flaw exposing itself when forcing, by lack of alternative, children to remain institutionalised in a school system through the lack of job prospects. One could argue a range of causes for mental disorders in children, including eating disorders, but the therapy offered by workforce placement, is the cheapest answer to the problems caused by institutionalisation, and in the long term, the most successful and productively sustaining of all mental health therapies: In short, teach children at an early age to stand upon their own two feet, and face-off to the world "at large"!

Yes Dr. Albert, Susie, my understanding is that eating disorders are primarily a factor of people’s body image being influenced by their social environment – which I was quite surprised to find out recently at a seminar given by a children’s hospital in Sydney. It seems counter-intuitive because I think earlier theorists had done a pretty good job of convincing the world that it was associated with abuse, neglect etc, but the doctors who made the presentation made the point that a number of studies had found absolutely no correlation between childhood trauma and the development of anorexia, and only a very small correlation for bulimia. The did say however that certain personality types were more susceptible, especially those who had high anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder – which are understood as largely genetic in origin. The way I interpret things, it seems like there is a “tipping point” between disordered eating behaviours and the development of a full-blown eating disorder in which the person’s perceptions of reality become distorted. However at this point scientists apparently haven’t identified exactly what this consists of in a neurological sense.

I have to take issue with the idea that appearance is “superficial” however. I think people have a deep-set need to express themselves to the outside world, and it seems to me that young people often don’t have the communication skills or the confidence, even the financial means, to do this to their satisfaction. I don’t think you can make assumptions to the effect that individuals don’t think hard about their choices, because subjectively the issue of a person’s perception of their own place in the world has a lot of significance.