A chance posting on Facebook last fall, however, brought Heather the first breath of hope she had felt in years. In Ohio, there was an experimental five-day intensive program to help adults with anorexia. What made this one different was that it used the latest neurobiology research to mold its goals as well as how its treatment was delivered. And since research confirms that most patients struggle to make changes to their entrenched behaviors on their own, patients also had to invite up to four support people to join them on the residential program. Heather asked her father and her sister, and began raising the funds to fly them all to Ohio.

“I need this to work,” she said. “I have nothing else to try.”

* * *

Despite its reputation as a quintessentially modern disorder, anorexia is nothing new. Historians believe that many of the ‘fasting saints’ of the Middle Ages had anorexia. The first medical report of the illness appeared in 1689, written by London physician Richard Morton, who described it as “a Nervous Consumption” caused by “Sadness and anxious Cares.”

Even as recently as the 1970s, anorexia remained something of a clinical oddity—a disease that doctors rarely saw, let alone had a clue how to treat. When psychologist Laura Hill saw her first anorexia patient at a university counseling center back in 1979, she had never even heard of the disorder: “Her father was in the science department there and I had to ask him what anorexia was,” recalls Hill. “He told me she was unable to gain weight, afraid of food.”

Rates of anorexia had been steadily climbing since the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the death of singer Karen Carpenter in 1983 that the disorder became a household word. She died from heart failure due to anorexia nervosa, and all of a sudden newspaper stories and after-school TV specials began to feature teenage girls “dying to be thin.” Besides highlighting the spectacle of a healthy, attractive young girl’s determination to starve herself, the storylines usually focused on the family dysfunction that psychologists believed lay at the heart of the disorder. Parents were told not to be the food police, that anorexia was a misguided search for control. Only when they let their child be fully in control of their own life would the anorexia resolve.

Psychiatrist Walter Kaye wasn’t convinced. Despite not having done research into eating disorders before, he had been asked to help finish an anorexia study for the U.S. National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s. While talking with the participants, he noticed something unusual.

“I was just kind of struck by how homogenous the symptoms were,” he says. Because the patients seemed so similar in terms of symptoms and temperament, he believed there had to be something in their biology that was causing anorexia – and he dedicated himself to finding out what it was.