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Anorexia Hong Kong Case Study

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Anorexia in Hong Kong
Watters starts his case studies with the rise of anorexia in Hong Kong, and how the Western form of anorexia “worms its way into the unconscious minds of a population” (p.48). In the 1990’s there were many political, cultural, and social changes occurring due to the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China. During this apprehensive time, the story of a young girl named Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying and her struggle with self-starvation surfaced and gained attention. The reason Chi-Ying’s story went viral was because she passed away on a public street waiting for the bus because her organs shut down. After this, the Western concept of Anorexia Nervosa, which included self-starvation as a symptom, was introduced and quickly popularized. Once this diagnoses was included in the ‘symptom pool’, many women began expressing this behavior as a ‘cry for help’ in order to bring attention to their own unhappiness and distress (p. 56, 65)

MP → The main point that Watters makes in this chapter is that the recognition of a disorder and the rise of public awareness can influence the prevalence of that disorder within a country.

Once anorexia was introduced in Japan, there was a massive social transformation in way of unhappiness and distress was portrayed. Similar to the concept of hysteria, anorexia in Japan is socially constructed …show more content…

Debra Wentz was one of many in Sri Lanka during the time of the tsunami and believed the after-effects would result in mental health disaster (p73). Westerner psychologists and psychiatrists were very quick to assume the people of Sri Lanka were going to face sever trauma from this natural disaster and thus needed Western humanitarian and psychological help. With the spread of this assumption, hundreds of Western counselors, psychiatrists, and traumatologists traveled to Sri Lanka to prevent a PTSD

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