Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. (Photo: GT/Li Hao)

Raising awareness about anorexia in China

Although already alarmingly thin, Mu Mu, a 26-year-old woman from Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, continues to starve herself in an effort to lose more weight.

"I often survive on nothing but water for three days," said Mu, who currently weighs just 36 kilograms. "Nothing pleases me more than seeing myself getting lighter on the weight scale day by day."

Mu's obsession with getting ever thinner has taken a toll. She said that she is constantly irritable, suffers from faintness and headaches due to low blood pressure, and has stopped menstruating.

Although her husband and parents constantly berate and beg her to eat, she refuses to budge.

"I eat absolutely nothing during the day," said Mu. "Sometimes, when I can't tolerate the feeling of hunger anymore, I eat a little snack, but immediately afterward, I hate myself for it."

"Normal people can't understand people like me," she admitted. "I just have to lose more weight."

In today's China, where thinness is often equated with beauty, Mu's behavior might not seem unusual to some.

Indeed, Mu said she did not think there was anything wrong with her mentally or physically, and balked at the idea of attending therapy for her eating disorder.

However Song Zhenzhu, a psychologist at the No.1 Mental Hospital in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang Province, made clear that in his opinion, Mu was suffering from a serious mental illness known as anorexia nervosa - an eating disorder characterized by an obsession with weight loss, restriction of food intake and often, a belief that one is never thin enough, no matter how emaciated or frail one's body becomes.

"Anorexia nervosa is a physiological barrier caused by psychological factors," said Song. "People suffering from anorexia often have a distorted self-perception of their own body, which is caused by various cognitive biases."

In the West, there has been considerable media interest about eating disorders since the 1980s, following the death of popular US singer Karen Carpenter from complications related to anorexia. Since then, it has been widely reported that a number of high-profile celebrities have also admitted to suffering from eating disorders, including Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Alba.

In China however, awareness of anorexia remains mostly restricted to the medical profession.

There are currently no statistics about how many people in China suffer from anorexia nervosa, though Song said that based on the number of patients he was treating, it was on the rise in the country.

According to the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, 1.6 million people, or around 2.5 percent of Britain's population are affected by some sort of eating disorder. Around 11 percent of those that suffer from eating disorders are men.

"Compared to the Western world, public awareness of anorexia nervosa in China is rather low," Song said.