Karen Carpenter's Death Draws Attention to Anorexia

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Karen Carpenter's Death Draws Attention to Anorexia

Newspaper article

By: David Arnold

Date: February 8, 1983

Source: Arnold, David. "Karen Carpenter's Death Draws Attention to Anorexia." Boston Globe, February 8, 1983.

About the Author: David Arnold is a reporter who specializes in health issues with the Boston Globe, a daily newspaper with a circulation of over 500,000 based in Boston, Massachusetts.

INTRODUCTION

Eating disorders have been part of many cultures since antiquity. Ancient Romans invented the vomitorium, a place to purge bloated stomachs during multi-day feasts so that celebrants could return to consume more food, while religious ascetics had long used fasting as a ritual to help gain spiritual purity. The eating disorder known as anorexia nervosa was given its name in 1868 by Sir William Whitney Gull, a British physician, who noted several cases of self-starvation in young girls. He ascribed the patients' "want of appetite" to "a morbid mental state … We might call the state hysterical" [European Neurology 55 (2006): 53-56].

At the same time, French physician Charles Lasègue found that girls suffering from anorexia went through three phases during their illness. First, they used alleged discomfort after eating as an excuse to reduce consumption. Second, they became preoccupied with weight loss and food. In the third stage, they entered into an emaciated and compromised state that led to death unless medical experts intervened. Despite the risk of death, Lasègue noted, the girls continued to starve themselves, against logic.

In addition to self-starvation, Lasègue noted that patients who were forcefed as part of their treatment often vomited deliberately afterward. In the late 1860s, physicians referred to this as cynorexia; people who binged and then purged themselves by vomiting were called cynorexics; the modern term for this eating disorder is bulimia nervosa.

Cases of anorexia and bulimia dot medical literature from the late 1860s onward. Most patients were girls in their teens from middle and upper class families; most were treated in private hospitals. A handful of cases document the experiences of male anorectics or bulimics.

In the late 1970s in the United States, various dieting fads took hold; fashion magazines idolized railthin women as the female ideal. While this was not new—the 1960s had established the model Twiggy as an ideal—the trickle down effect of these fashion trends to teen and preteen readers affected ideals of the female body. Books such as Hilde Bruch's The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa came to public attention as mainstream newspapers began to review books on the issue and discuss this disturbing trend.

By the 1980s, eating disorders had become a major social and medical concern. A 1981 television movie, The Best Little Girl in the World, adapted from a 1978 novel by the New York psychotherapist Steven Levenkron, told the story of Kessie, the "perfect" daughter—straight-A student, happily involved in school activities, well liked by her peers. When her weight dropped to 98 pounds and her obsession with thinness put her life in jeopardy, her family was forced to confront their dysfunction.

Nor were celebrities immune from the pressure to be thin and perfect. Singer Karen Carpenter, half of the 1970s duo The Carpenters, whose hits such as "Close to You" and "We've Only Just Begun" have become pop classics, battled anorexia for sixteen years. Although she sought treatment after reading Levenkron's book, the disease had progressed too far, and she died on February 4, 1983.

PRIMARY SOURCE

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

SIGNIFICANCE

While psychologists and some physicians had known of anorexia and bulimia trends, the public was shocked by Karen Carpenter's death and the intricacies—as well as prevalence,—of eating disorders in the United States. Carpenter, a famous rock star with a string of hits in the early 1970s, had fought anorexia since the age of seventeen, when she developed a distorted sense of her body and self-image while performing on the national, and later, the international music scenes.

People with anorexia typically lose fifteen to sixty percent of their body weight; over time the body, needing protein from some source, begins to consume its own muscle mass, at times targeting even the heart. In Karen Carpenter, years of anorexia had weakened her heart. She had been under a physician's care but the damage done by years of anorexia were irreversible, and she died of cardiac arrest. Her mother found her naked and unconscious near a walk-in closet at their home.

Treatment for anorexia, which affects one percent of all females ages ten to twenty, and bulimia, which affects approximately four percent of all females ages ten to twenty, has changed since 1983, when Karen Carpenter's death brought the issue into the public spotlight. Public health campaigns aimed at healthy eating, improving body image and self-esteem, along with health curricula that discuss the dangers of anorexia and bulimia treat eating disorders as social and medical issues. Fashion magazines began to promote toned bodies with more athletic features in the mid 1980s, but in the late 1990s, extremely thin models and celebrities such as Kate Moss, Calista Flockhart, and Lara Flynn Boyle continued the emphasis on an unhealthy, unattainably thin ideal.

Approximately one in seven anorexia and bulimia patients is male; the disorders manifest in different ways with men. Male bulimics use obsessive exercise to hide purging, and many high school and college wrestlers use bulimia for weight class control. Male anorectics follow patterns that are similar to females'.

Researchers estimate that as many as one in four women exhibit some eating disorder behavior at some point in time, generally during the late teens and early twenties. While most pass through this phase quickly, six percent of all women develop a clinical eating disorder. Approximately twenty percent of all people with eating disorders die as a direct result of eating disorder behaviors or from medical complications related to anorexia or bulimia.