Oganesyan Alina

PhD student in sociology, Université Paris Cité

Doctoral school: 624 - Sciences des sociétés

Contact: alina.oganesyan(at)etu.u-paris.fr

Dissertation title: Trajectories of bulimics

Under the direction of Laurence Simmat-Durand and Emmanuel Langlois

Bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by the intake of excessive amounts of food followed by “inappropriate and recurrent compensatory behaviors aimed at preventing weight gain, such as: induced vomiting, excessive use of laxatives, diuretics, enemas or other medications; young ; excessive physical exercise” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

In France, bulimia is now supported by services specializing in eating disorders (ED), but this support is not obvious. ED services are not very numerous and have a fairly limited capacity. General practitioners who are responsible for directing requests for care to psychiatric hospitals do not always share the psychiatric vision of the diagnosis of bulimia, which leads to diagnostic wandering. In addition, people prone to binge eating feel shame about their practice. This is underlined by the Haute Autorité Santé (HAS) and the Fédération Française Anorexia Bulimie (FFAB) which published in 2019 a document called "Spotting and general elements of care", where shame and fear appear in the list of barriers to care access for people with bulimia.

In this national context, where care is difficult, people affected by bulimic disorder experience situations of significant psychological distress and are often forced to turn to unconventional therapeutic solutions.

The objectives of this research are to:

1. Restore the social and therapeutic trajectories of people affected by bulimia;
2. Clarify the ways in which bulimia is perceived and diagnosed by the various actors in the therapeutic field;
3. Understand how perceptions of the body and of food are constructed and how they shape the eating behavior of actors;
4. To wonder about the transformations in the perception of bulimia experienced by the actors at the different stages of their experience of bulimia;
5. Understand how these perceptions (of the body, of food and of bulimia) relate to the therapeutic models followed by the actors;
6. Provide methodological tools to address the subject of bulimia in the social sciences.