Abnormal Psychology: Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS)
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Significance of the Topic

Although anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder have gotten more media attention, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS) is actually the most prevalent eating disorder in the general population. The estimated prevalence is 4.78% in adolescents and 4.64% in adults, according to one research study (LeGrange, et al., 2012). Although individuals with this disorder may not have the dangerously low or high body weight or frequency of purging behavior of the better-known eating disorders, the eating behaviors of sufferers still cause significant distress.

Connection to Abnormal Psychology

The existence of far more diversity within the category of eating disorders than recently thought, including the inclusion of binge eating disorder as a medically classified mental illness, versus solely being viewed as a failure of willpower, highlights the degree to which research on eating disorders, and the best ways to classify and understand them, continues to evolve.

Eating disorders remain one of the most troubling categories for psychologists to analyze. They are both physical and mental in their effects. They can cause significant developmental complications for adolescents in terms of normal physical and social development, although they can affect individuals of any age. Eating disorders have been understood through a number of lenses, including biological ones (determining physical triggers for the illness, including genetics), environmental and cultural ones, as well as understanding eating disorders through both the lens of addiction and obsessive-compulsive compulsions and rituals. It can also be very difficult to determine if the physical manifestations of the disorders impact comorbidity for other disorders, such as malnutrition triggering depression and anxiety. Individuals with eating disorders, even when the disorder causes them profound distress, can also be...…and exercise habits in anorexics specifically, versus other eating disordered patients (Dahlgren, et al., 2019).

Recommendations

It is critical to end the stigma attached to eating disorders, or to suggest that EDNOS is less serious than anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating. EDNOS can still have significant physical and mental health consequences. There also may be some unique clinical manifestations of EDNOS that must be explored, including the tendency for comorbidity with other psychological illnesses. Overall, eating disordered patients, although there may be different behavior patterns and complications between the diagnostic categories, must be treated as individuals, not as the sum of their illness. Future research into the distinctive nature of EDNOS is required, as well as a consideration for further subdivision of the diagnostic category regarding specific behaviors that are not adequately explained by the fact that the patient does not meet the criteria for other eating disorders.

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