Gregg Jantz

This film does not reflect the extraordinary work it and other centers and clinicians provide. Although she must have seen much more, Greenfield limited her focus to the obsession with thinness and its related symptoms and behaviors. She missed a golden opportunity to increase awareness and reveal the real reasons behind eating disorders; instead, she went for shock over substance.

The film shows the drama and pain of eating disorders but fails to explain why women might succumb to them. Eating disorders are complicated, bio-psychosocial problems that have grown exponentially in recent years.

Today, women of all ages experience unprecedented stress due to their rapidly changing social role in the global consumer culture; strict cultural standards regarding women, weight, and appearance; unattainable media images; and the contagious fear of obesity. In such an era, many women desperately believe what I call The Body Myth: that we can master the complex dilemmas of our lives by controlling our bodies, our weight, our shape and our relationship to food. The extreme focus on losing weight, restricting food and counting calories distracts them from their underlying anxiety and depression.

What may start as a way to solve a problem, cope with a loss or improve self-esteem will turn into a deadly disease for some vulnerable women. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. They are the leading cause of death in young women and are the third most frequent illness in school-age girls, second to asthma and diabetes. We need to understand more about eating disorders, we need to prevent them, and we need to have compassion for those who suffer and their families and loved ones. Greenfield's "Thin" did not help us to do so.

The documentary's dangerous exercise in artistic expression may cause many, either on the brink or in the midst of these disorders, and their families, to feel a sense of hopelessness and doom. Having worked as a specialist in eating disorders for more than 25 years and having run several hospital-based eating disorder programs, I have seen people recover fully. It takes time and hope and compassion. But eating disorders tend to destroy hope and rob people of the belief that life could ever be better for them, or that they deserve anything better. "Thin" reinforces the hopelessness and does not tell the full story.

Greenfield failed us. She failed to tell viewers about the multiple sides of the disorder: how people do recover, how therapists say things that make a difference, that recovery involves developing the mind and learning how to ground the body into calmer states, not only with food, but with changing thoughts and relationships, with others and with the self.

Greenfield's editing doesn't do justice to the therapeutic journey of recovery. She makes it look flat and only about food. It's so much more. While eating disorders are always serious, she only shows the most dramatic cases, and only at their most acute point. People suffer terribly from eating disorders even if they never get to the point of needing residential or inpatient treatment. Only in our body-conscious and perfectionist culture would a filmmaker feel free to depict these life-threatening disorders with no explanation of them and no reference to the recovery and outcome. In fact, the film ends with no mention of the many avenues for information and help, such as the National Eating Disorders Association (www.nationaleatingdisorders.org).

Based on my clinical experience, I know that treatment works and that people do recover and make life-supporting changes. Families and friends stand by them and help the healing. I fear that this film will discourage people from treatment rather than encourage them. Yes, it shows us that having an eating disorder involves a lot of suffering, but it doesn't suggest that there could be hope for release from its grip. I have hope.

Margo Maine, co-founder of the Maine & Weinstein Specialty Group, is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders. She is a member of the psychiatry departments at the Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital's Mental Health Network and at Connecticut Children's Medical Center, and she is author of "The Body Myth: Adult Women and the Pressure to Be Perfect" (with Joe Kelly, John Wiley, 2005).
Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant