Independent medical expert answers
on psychiatry and psychology

Drinkorexia

Written by: Jacob Palme, Professor, Stockholm University.
First version: 01 Mar 2012. Latest version: 08 Feb 2017.

Abstract:

Drinkorexia is a combination of starvation during the day (anorexia) with partying and drinking in the night (alcohol abuse).

Question:

What is meant by Drinkorexia? Is it good or bad?

Answer:

By drinkorexia is meant an eating disorder which combines Anorexia Nervosa with Alcoholism. Drinkorexia is not an accepted psychatric diagnostic term, but it is a popular term for this very dangerous combination of two dangerous behaviours.

A person suffering from drinkorexia combines not eating almost any food during the day (Anorexia Nervosa) with drinking a lot of alcoholic beverages during nighttime partying (Alcohol abuse). Starving during the day enhances the effect of the alcohol in the night, much as combining two drugs enhances the effect of each of the drugs. Sometimes, the alcohol abuse is combined with cocaine abuse.

Many young women aspire for stardom, and believe that an extremely narrow waistline will increase the possibility of becoming a star. They want to be sexually attractive for film producers and directors, people who might open up the changes for stardom. And such people, they expect to find during the righttime partying. During this partying, drinking alcoholic beverages has a stronger effect on the starving body, in the worst case resulting in a collapse.

And collapse, of course, will cause the film producers and directors to shy away from them. Young women are more susceptible to drinkorexia, since their body fat cannot store alcohol.

"young women are unable to process alcohol at the same rate as young men because they do not express the alcohol dehydrogenase as highly, although, the inverse is true among the middle-aged"
Quote from wikipedia article quoting scientific article.

The term ”drinkorexia” is new, but the behavior is not new. For years, this type of behavior has been observed in the clinical field (outside of universities).

Drinkorexia is extremely dangerous. There is risk for brain damage, Korsakoff's psychosis and loss of memory. Thus, they will often forget, the next day, what happened the day before. They often make up stories to hide their memory loss.

More information
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