This blog has moved to Dr. Sharma's home site, www.drsharma.ca.

- If you subscribe by email, easily update your email subscribtion here!
- If you subscribe by RSS, your feed should redirect automatically.
- Please change your bookmarks (and any web links) to point to drsharma.ca!
- All posts before the move will remain here as an archive and new posts will only be found at the new location.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Psychogenic Classification of Obesity

There is a widespread notion that all obese people must have mental health problems that make them eat.

This notion is WRONG!

As discussed in a recent article by my good friend Tessa van der Merwe from the University of Pretoria, one psychological classification of patients with obesity is as follows:

Schizoid Obesity: this is a small minority of patients who display a lack of autonomy, have difficulty establishing boundaries between self and non-self and experience surreal feelings of being governed by external forces. These patients tend to become unbalanced in the long-term with a continuous psychopathological process after weight-loss treatments and will invariably fail most programs.

Egodystonic Obesity: this relatively large group of patients is characterised by living with their obesity in a conflicted way. They often display reactive depression and anxiety and have the continuous need for comfort eating, repeated dietary attempts at weight loss and a high degree of restraint eating.

Egosyntonic Obesity: this may be the majority of patients who develop obesity for a variety of reasons that might be personal, familial, hereditary or cultural. Despite their obesity, they live without psychological problems. They are often extrovert, talented people with a good sense of reality and body image, but with a total inability to resist social eating cues.

Does this classification help in practice? Appreciate any thoughts and comments on this.

AMS

No comments: