Unveiling the Hidden Forces Shaping Our Relationship with Food: A Provocative Review of Amber Husain’s "Tell Me How You Eat"
At a check-up, alarmed medical personnel immediately offered her a choice: enrolling in hospital “daycare,” an outpatient treatment that entailed a “a total surrender of adult life to supervised eating routines,” or a four-month course of weekly group therapy in a treatment program called MANTRA. She chose the latter, then discovered the acronym’s meaning and origin: “the Maudsley Model of Anorexia Nervosa Treatment for Adults…named for a hospital named for a man who preached that mental illness was a form of ‘moral insanity.’ ” Within MANTRA, “The hope is that [the participants] will recognize the error in themselves and learn to see the world like normal people.” In other words, the world doesn’t need to change. You do.
