We Need A Harm Reductionist Approach to Eating Disorders
People who don’t wish to ‘recover’ still deserve autonomy and care.
I just finished reading the book Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan last week, and it stands out to me as the first book I’ve ever read that applies a harm reduction framework to eating disordered behaviors. The conversation with Gloria Lucas included in the book discusses this subject, and what it looks like in practice the most thoroughly, but since I’d never heard it discussed before, I was alight with excitement and curiosity the moment Hassan brought the topic up within the book’s first few pages.
Harm reduction, for those unfamiliar, is an approach to public health issues that prioritizes body autonomy over forcing a person to meet external standard of ‘healthiness’ or moral correctness. Harm reduction holds that society has a responsibility to care for all people, no matter their choices, behaviors, or desires. It views individuals as the sole authority on what happens to their own bodies — and it acknowledges that trying to force an outcome or behavior change on a person who doesn’t want it is not only destined to fail, it’s a violation of their consent and dignity.
Rather than judging people for their choices, or attempting to shape their behavior from the outside using…
