The manifestation of that disorder is, i suspect, strongly influenced by the society you find yourself in. So anorexia for example, as a method of regaining control for (predominantly) women who find themselves in a situation they cannot otherwise exert power in.
The existence of ROGD and social contagion, especially in young females, seems to back this up. I know other professionals are thinking along the same lines.
Bowl this article specifically about buhemia and social contagion is worth reading.
'The Strange, Contagious History of Bulimia'
(extract)
In 1972, a woman checked into London’s Royal Free Hospital to be treated for anorexia. “I found her symptoms to be unique,” Gerald Russell, the British psychologist who treated her, tells me. “They didn’t match the diagnostic criteria for anorexia at all.” Unlike his emaciated patients with sallow skin and big eyes, Russell’s new patient was of average weight. Her face was full. Her cheeks were pink as the skin of an onion. She was the first of roughly thirty instances of this unusual condition that crossed the threshold of his clinic over the next seven years, each person presenting with perplexing purging behaviors secondary to binge eating. Russell wasn’t dealing with anorexia nervosa, he realized, but something as yet undefined by psychology or medicine.
In fact, he had stumbled upon a condition that science had yet to see in large numbers or identify at any time in the long history of eating disorders. Psychological Medicine published Russell’s ensuing paper on these unusual cases; in it, he described the key features of this novel mental illness he was now referring to as bulimia nervosa. Many in the scientific community objected to Russell’s conclusions, pointing to the limited and problematic sample size he’d used. At the time, however, there were simply too few cases for Russell to draw from. The pool in the 1970s was just too small.
As bulimia gained further diagnostic legitimacy in 1980 with its inclusion in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Russell ruefully tracked its unexpectedly swift spread across Europe and North America, where it infiltrated college campuses, affecting 15 percent of female students in sororities, all-women dormitories, and female collegiate sports teams. The disease moved through the halls of American high schools, where binging, fasting, diet pill use, and other eating disorder symptoms easily clustered. He chased its dispersion across Egypt, where the number of new cases grew to 400,000. In Canada, it swelled to 600,000. In Russia, 800,000. In India, 6 million. In China, 7 million. In the UK, one out of every one hundred women was now developing the disorder.
“It makes you wonder if maybe bulimia wasn’t a new eating disorder, that it was always there and people just didn’t notice it or talk about it before your paper came out,” I offer.
Russell demurs politely. If the hidden afflicted numbered as overwhelmingly high as they now seem, surely the condition would have made itself known well before he — or anyone, for that matter — identified it. “You might suggest it required somebody to come along and put two and two together before people felt safe talking about bulimia, but I don’t believe that.
“Until then,” he continued, “the disorder was extremely rare. But after 1980, it became widespread in a very short period of time. Once it was described, and I take full responsibility for that with my paper, there was a common language for it. And knowledge spreads very quickly.”
With this knowledge, Russell’s discovery took on characteristics of a pandemic that was set to claim 30 million people, but neither he nor anyone could do a thing at that point to stop it. He was confronted, he says, by a problem of entropy, a gradual decline into disorder with devastating implications for social contagions: once they are out, they are virtually impossible to rein it back in again.(continues)
www.thecut.com/article/how-bulimia-became-a-medical-diagnosis.html
The author Lee Daniel Kravetz has also written a book, 'Strange Contagion,Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors & Viral Emotions & What They Tell Us About Ourselves'
leedanielkravetz.com/what-we-do/