After watching The Hours, and learning about autonomy and how everyone needs to have that kind of support in their lives, people have the need to be in control of their lives. Where in the movie, all the women thought that suicide was the one thing that they could control in their lives, that was the thing that their husbands and responsibilities couldn't control. When learning about this extreme sense to gain control, I thought of girls and boys who have eating disorders. Where psychologically, they can feel so out of control with their lives, that they try and control what they put, or don't put, into their bodies. Although, there are other ideas that go into Eating Disorders, I thought that autonomy was greatly related.
I found an article that hypothesized that disturbances in the development of autonomy are a central psychological feature in anorexia nervosa. Specifically, that both restrictive and bulimic anorexics would evidence greater problems with autonomy than would controls and, further, that the three groups would show differential patterns of response on these measures. The study proved to show that this was a true hypothesis. The study states that autonomy isn't the single factor for certain eating disorders, but can be useful in the treatment of some eating disorders.
http://psycnet.apa.org.proxy.lib.uni.edu/journals/abn/96/3/254.pdf
I believe that having control over one's own life is a huge motivating factor for how we choose to live our lives, and we want to be able to control certain things. For eating disorders, their reinforce is the way that they feel about themselves when they lose the weight, but the idea that they will never be their 'perfect' size shows that persistence and need to be what their idea of perfect is.
I think this article provides a good starting point for understanding the nuances of the development of an eating disorder, but there was one question that lingered in my mind. Why do these women who have autonomy deficits feel the need to increase their sense of self-control by developing an eating disorder? I mean there are tens or hundreds of other things that people can do to provide them with an increased sense of autonomy. The article also described how restrictive anorexics appear to feel ineffective, which means they feel like they can't even adequately control their behaviors. Also, it seemed ironic to me that people who lack autonomy would develop an eating disorder like anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa because these disorders actually lead to a loss of control-over what they eat, how they behave, how they dress, what they think about (food), etc. For that reason, it seems like having this disorder and that sense of wanting control (autonomy deficit) might actually be the result rather than the cause. For instance, a model or athlete would not develop an eating disorder in order to be better at their job out of a sense of autonomy. However, it is likely that an eating disorder is the result of biological(hypothalamus, 5HT, genetics,gender), environmental (social- (media,friends,family,), and psychological (self-esteem, control would go here)factors that interact.
This link provides a brief commentary on the subject.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/consuming-thoughts/200804/biology-and-blame