Shan Guisinger, Ph.D.

Dream chapter

Webmaster — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:26:48 +0000

Dream Chapter

Invulnerables, People with autism, and archetypes

Webmaster — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:40:56 +0000

Here is a link to this paper:

Invulnerables

Globe and Mail Article

Webmaster — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:38:09 +0000

A disease to fight famine?

by Stephen Strauss

Saturday, January 17, 2004 – The Globe & Mail, Page F8

Excerpt:

Feeling hungry, but aren’t tempted to eat? Want instead to start running and keep chugging as long as you can?
In humanity’s hungry past, these twinned responses might have been a vital survival instinct for someone needing the strength to flee from famine. But today the same body response might be anorexia nervosa.
This is the radical thesis that evolutionary psychologist Shan Guisinger put forward in a paper recently published in the journal Psychological Review. She describes the failures of psychological and social theories to explain the reason anorexia strikes so many more women than men — a ratio of 10 to 1 is often cited — and the condition’s strange features.

Here is a link to a site that reprinted this article:

Reprint

Here is the Globe and Mail’s site:

Globe and mail

Boston Globe Article

Webmaster — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:32:19 +0000

Summary

The ancestry of anorexia
Blame biology, not parenting, new theory suggests

By Ellen Ruppel Shell, Globe Correspondent | December 30, 2003

Anorexia, the most lethal of psychiatric disorders, afflicts as many as 1 percent of young women and about a tenth as many men, and casts a Svengalian spell, leading its victims to willingly starve themselves in the midst of plenty. Now, psychologist Shan Guisinger has developed a radical new view of anorexia that she says explains both the bizarre features of the illness — self starvation and hyperactivity — and its resistance to treatment by traditional psychotherapy.
Anorexia, she contends, is not primarily a psychological condition brought on by a troubled childhood — as is often thought — but a disorder based in biology, specifically in the appetite regulation mechanism in the brain. Her theory postulates that anorexics have a biological adaptation to weight loss that causes their bodies to shut off hunger signals, and to ratchet up physical activity, even as their flesh melts away.

Here is a link to the Globe site:

Globe

Self article

Webmaster — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:26:46 +0000

Here is a link to a pdf of the article:

Shan Self

Seed article

Webmaster — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:21:15 +0000

Here is a link to a pdf of the the article:

Shan Seed

Article in Elle

Webmaster — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:12:17 +0000

Here is a link to a pdf of the article:

Elle

This is a new comment.

Webmaster — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:34:39 +0000

Famous people with Anorexia (Historical)

Webmaster — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 05:02:07 +0000

This is under construction.

Links and text on
Joan of Arc
Catherine of Siena

Competing Paradigms for Anorexia Nervosa

Alex — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:35:24 +0000

The contributors to the April 2007 American Psychologist special issue on eating disorders are to be commended for acknowledging lack of progress in understanding, classifying, and treating anorexia nervosa (AN). They highlighted the acute need to refine diagnosis (Wonderlich, Joiner, Keel, Williamson, & Crosby, 2007), understand comprehensive causal mechanisms to tune treatments and transcend “hodgepodge diagnoses” (Striegel-Moore & Bulik, 2007, pp. 181–182), study functional neural circuits and link behavior with “genomic, cellular, and systems data” (Chavez & Insel, 2007, p. 164), and develop effective treatments (Wilson, Grilo, & Vitousek, 2007, p. 201). Specifically, Chavez and Insel (2007) wrote that “present-day treatments are significantly limited” and that identifying underlying pathophysiology “will be critical for developing more effective treatments and preventive strategies” (p. 160). This state of the field could suggest that a new paradigm is needed, but new paradigms are often resisted by the established scientific community (Kuhn, 1962), of which the contributors to the special issue are internationally recognized leaders.

Link to Full letter:

Guisinger AP Comment 2008