5 "Anorexics and bulimics draw upon the common cultural vocabulary of their time, through latching onto the contemporary mania about dieting, thinness, and food control that have become endemic the the advanced industrial societies. They utilise these cultural preoccupations as defences that enable them to escape from— and achieve some sense of control over— unmanageable personal distress, most of which revolves around issues of identity. Similar to hysteria, anorexia and bulimia are socially patterned, the fashionable style of achieving specialness through deviance." — ~Anorexia and Bulimia: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic, Richard A. Gordon