George Cruickshank (1792-1878), DECEMBER - A Swallow at Christmas, 1841.
Set up in 1960 in the United States, Overeaters Anonymous (OA) runs support groups which bring together people suffering from eating disorders, without medical mediation. Officially established by their founder Rozanne S., who personally suffered from compulsive eating, the groups are set up on the model that Alcoholics Anonymous pioneered in the 30s. Structured around concrete legal and symbolic frameworks (the Twelve Steps, the Twelve Traditions), OA grew progressively in the United States, making up for the want of specialised and consistent medical response to a predicament then deemed essentially feminine. By August 1962 they counted more than twenty-one Meetings, at that point in time spread over three states. In 2012 the international OA Bureau estimated its membership at 54000 worldwide, it is today a transnational association representing bulimia, anorexia or even polyphagia sufferers in over seventy-five countries. Reaching France in 1983 through the cultural mediation of natural, charismatic leaders whose life trajectories reflected that of the founder, they numbered twenty-six Meetings in 2019.
An alternative therapeutic approach, Overeaters Anonymous gives a voice to a traditionally unheard experience, that of people unhappy in their own body, obsessed by food, body weight, whether with a medical diagnosis or not. Their Evangelically rooted recovery proposal is devised around personal responsibility. It is bound in a Tradition-led communal commitment aimed at constraining deviant practices. As a safe space in which to confront the impact of the illness, the peer group represents the compliance leading to the setting up of relationships hinging on watchfulness, identification or mutual support. It is through this communal cocooning within this new network of relationships that the OA member succeeds in altering his deviant-perceived behaviours.
Joining this “community of equals” results in a spiritual and practical transformation which alters the participant’s representations and lifestyle as members come under the twin constraints of having to work towards their recovery, turning away from their deviance while keeping faith with the group which constantly reasserts their debility. Recovery through Salvation paradoxically precludes the likelihood of healing. Denied salvation without the community, members must henceforward join in the symbolic crusade to grow the movement.
Open to everyone OA is able to co-opt a left-out population on the margins of institutional care for whom no therapy works. Within their heterogenous population there are cases of social isolation, and even of formal disaffiliation. Rejecting administrative and social structures, others declare themselves social care refusers in regard to public policies. However, regardless of their side-lining, the groups thrust their counter-expertise upon doctors whose knowledge they question and whose lack of consideration for the sufferers’ voice they deplore, offering the while a certain medical truth. As a therapeutic offer among a great many (from lucrative dieting businesses to specialised medical services), they grow paradoxically “alongside” the institutions, drawing resources from them while rejecting some of their principles. They maintain an invidious relationship both against and with legitimate institutions.
All told, support groups fulfil three purposes. In their therapeutic capacity, they promise healing even if it comes with the granting of salvation goods. When they set up a constraining framework aimed at stalling eating disorders, they enforce religious norms and representations opposed to the approaches favoured by health establishments. Next, as genuine social communities, they offer each participant the opportunity to develop socially within the group, to find “their place” at long last. Lastly, as a crusading space, the groups are the arena in which they claim the legitimacy of their collective knowledge. Asserting their “expertise-by-experience”, OA amounts to a model of – admittedly low intensity – therapeutic activism that fits in with the emergent thinking around patient representation.
Read more in the dictionary : Vegetarianism
Read the paper in French : Outremangeurs Anonymes
References :
Jean-Pierre Poulain, Sociologie de l’obésité, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2009.
Juliette Froger-Lefebvre, « Les voix du rétablissement ». Sociologie politique des groupes de parole, le cas des Outremangeurs Anonymes, thèse pour le doctorat de science politique, réalisée sous la direction de Pascale Laborier à l’Université Paris Nanterre, 2020.
To quote this paper : Juliette Froger-Lefebvre, “Overeaters Anonymous”, in Hervé Guillemain (ed.), DicoPolHiS, Le Mans Université, 2024.
