Books like Anatomy of Anorexia by Steven Levenkron

Eighteen‑year‑old Susanna Kaysen is admitted to McLean Hospital in 1967, where she documents life in the psychiatric ward, exploring mental illness, recovery, and the cultural landscape of the late 1960s.

A powerful story of a teenage girl named Kessa who battles anorexia nervosa and the emotional turmoil that leads her into recovery. The novel portrays her interactions with family, friends, and a therapist, offering insight into the challenges of eating disorders.

A 16‑year‑old diary that confronts anger, abuse, and the complexities of a toxic relationship, revealed through an honest journal.

Advises the teen girl on viewing her body in a positive and healthy way so that diet and exercise programs don't get out of hand.

Compiled from real-life diaries kept by a mother and daughter, this title shows how one family faced up to and overcame teenage depression and eating disorders. It includes self-help sections for mothers and teenage girls and a chapter of professional advice completes the book.

With waiflike models dominating the advertising world and a new wave of feminists waging war on social pressure to be thin, eating disorders have, it seems, attained the status of a modern crisis. Although anorexia nervosa was not identified as such until the nineteenth century, the compulsion to be thin at the price of starvation has a long history in western society. Long before talk shows took over the air waves and Cosmopolitan hit the stands, obsession with body and fasting rituals plagued girls and women. But is anorexia as we know it today new? . In an engaging and thorough account of the history of self starvation in the western world, Walter Vandereycken and Ron Van Deth explore this question. Drawing on a myriad of intriguing examples, the authors show how self-inflicted starvation has changed its tone over the centuries and is inextricably enmeshed in socio-cultural contexts. Consider how drastically the meaning of fasting has mutated in the Christian western world: that in the twelfth century when divine miracles were accepted realities, an emaciated girl would have been seen as holy and touched by God. That same girl would have been considered possessed and cursed by Satan in the sixteenth century when popular belief in witches was on the rise. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls traces the history of starvation from its religious roots, bound up in rigid asceticism, to its economic ties, in the form of living skeletons like "shadow Harry" who toured freak shows displaying his protruding ribs for money, to the Victorian era, where modern sexual and gender stereotypes find their origin. The book is a result of exhaustive research, covering Europe and the United States and spanning the early centuries of Christianity to the present day. From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls will interest readers in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, women's studies, religious and social history, and cultural studies.