‘You Don’t Look Anorexic’

At the physical, Maxwell stared at her doctor in disbelief. She always thought that eating disorders were for skinny people. “I laughed,” she says. “I don’t use language like this any longer, but I told her she was crazy. I told her, ‘No, I have a self-control problem.’” For centuries, the eating disorder that would…

Lessons From a ‘Difficult Patient’

The only patients deemed more difficult than insistent patients like Sal were his opposites: patients so overwhelmed that they stopped wanting to pay any attention to their illnesses at all. They are well known to every doctor: a dialysis patient, gray from uremia, eyes glazed over when asked why she missed her last session; a…

Sadder but Wiser? Maybe Not.

“Its impact has been huge, and it’s been pervasive in so many aspects of research and pop culture that it can be hard to wind it back up,” Dr. Moore, a psychological researcher and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said of the original study. Under the influence of…