Masculinities and Mental Health: Eating Disorders in Men’s Lived Experience Contemporary Discourse

Masculinities and Mental Health explores literary texts, images, and performances which engage with the under-explored topic of eating disorders in men. Masculinities and Mental Health explores literary texts, images, and performances which engage with the under-explored topic of eating disorders in men. Eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses commonly associated with females only. The fact that men can suffer from anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating disorder, and other types of eating disorders too, presents a challenge not only to healthcare disciplines but also to public and cultural perceptions. Exploring eating disorders in boys and men, this book scrutinizes standardised concepts of masculinity and male mental health in contemporary discourse. It sets out to open up spaces for underrepresented experiences recognizing the urgency of this endeavour both as a matter of public health and as a challenge to entrenched cultural assumptions about who can develop, experience, and recover from an eating disorder. Drawing on clinical, socio-cultural, historical, and lived experience perspectives, the interdisciplinary author team aims to fill the gaps often left by single-discipline work. Emphasizing the plural of masculinities, the book explores how stereotypes of ‘manly’ strength or stoicism can obscure vulnerabilities and marginalize those whose experiences fall outside a normative script. It places personal accounts by boys and men with eating disorders, expressed through writing and other art forms, centre-stage. The volume offers readers living testimonies that challenge and enrich our understanding of diagnostic categories, as well as the ways in which eating disorders, masculinity, and male embodiment are manifested.