PSYCHOLOGY AND ANOREXIA (JANUARY 2005).
By Renato Cocchi, MD.
At the beginning of December 2004, Madame
Bernadette Chirac, wife of the French president Jacques Chirac, on a television
network of her country, told of her failure as a mother with the anorexia of
her 44-years old daughter Laurence. She was ashamed as for the mental health of
her daughter.
What said Madame Chirac was a demonstration
of the many damages of the ruling psychologisms, which go on to impose not
demonstrable explanations, besides, here, the same fact denies it.
If the problem was a psychological one, why
no psychologists could help Madame Chirac? Perhaps he refused any psychological
help? I do not believe it, after all admissions in hospitals of her daughter.
Or perhaps were all the French psychologists truly incompetent?
I shall report here some matters of fact.
The hypothalamus, the fundamental brain structure for the vegetative life, has
the hunger centre and the satiety centre. Following war wounds, several
soldiers had destroyed or injured even one only of these two centres.
When shut the hunger centre, the person gets
severe anorexia out because he never had hunger. When the satiety centre was
struck, the person suffered from bulimia as much ruinous. The events were then
verified in the animals, by intentionally damaging the one or the other out
these two centres.
This information appears in the Atlas of the
Nervous System, printed over 20 years ago in Italian from the CIBA, now
CIBA-Geigy with the magnificent illustrations of Netter. On internet there is
much research that confirms these mechanisms.
It is not necessary to have lesions, to
drive out of efficacy a brain mechanism. It is sufficient that its function is
disabled for true power or relative power (EG. hypersensitivity of receptors),
by a located inhibiting mechanism ( probably inhibiting B GABAergic pathways,
which exist even into the hypothalamus.
I need to recall here a simple rule of the
thumb. Any biological mechanism of our body can stop or go out of working, and
the result is not necessarily incompatible with the life.
I have to add an other behaviour of common
evidence.
During the night can raise an excess of
inhibiting B GABAergic function on the one or on the other of these two
hypothalamic centres. There are persons that do not have hunger in the morning,
and with only one coffee they arrive to noon, but others need to have breakfast
at once, some times before they wash.
For anorexia and bulimia, the
mechanism is the same, but the difference is only a problem of the amount and
of the reversibility, which is then the time lasting.
Do not tell anymore the history of the
magnificent and progressive fates reached by the psychotherapy in the feeding
troubles. Madame Chirac, as for her family experience, confirmed that this is
not always true.
Moreover, when the psychological
intervention works, it could happen that it does so not for the reasons stated
by psychologists and psychotherapists. It could enter into action, when things
run, an efficient and sufficient consummating mechanism on the excess of energy.