Eating disorders "mental health literacy": An introduction

No doubt there are many things that readers of this journal would not agree upon. What constitutes evidence-based treatment, how best to revise classification schemes, and the priority given to prevention, early intervention and treatment approaches to mental health improvement, are some examples. One thing that I hope all readers can agree upon, however, is that community knowledge and understanding of mental health problems is not as good as it should be. Community knowledge and understanding of eating-disordered behavior may be particularly poor. Reasons for this likely include the fact that certain eating disorders, such as binge eating disorder, are relatively new to the psychiatric nomenclature and the fact that certain eating disorder behaviors, such as extreme dietary restriction and excessive exercise, have strongly ego-syntonic properties. The goal of this contribution is to introduce readers to a field of research that I believe has promise in redressing this situation, namely, mental health literacy. After outlining the origins of the mental health literacy paradigm, I shall do my best to explain why its application to eating-disordered behavior has merit and how research in this field might be progressed