This is something psychologists have known for years: house anorexics on a hospital ward together, and anorexia may perseverate.3 As the writer Lee Daniel Kravetz puts it, “Bulimia is so contagious that support groups and in-treatment facilities designed to help patients are also primary spreading agents.”4 Treatment centers may help those with eating disorders to recover, but they can also provide opportunities for behavior modeling and foster unconscious competition over the worst symptoms, making everyone worse off. Offer a school assembly on one teen’s suicide and you will raise awareness,
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