Margaret (not her real name) is a highly emotional, mixed up 13 year old. Even at this very young age, she is already stricken with serious depression, being terrified about the possibility of not getting good reports from her school, and highly anxious and confused about her relationship with her parents. To compound the problem she seems to be cursed with an eating disorder called anorexia nervosa.
The desperate parents plaintive plea would strike a chord in in the heart of any parent who cares about the welfare of their offspring, when they said: “We are desperately searching for any body who can advise us on how to deal with our daughter......somebody knowledgeable, armed with the ability to provide guidance, ideas, or even just a few words of encouragement.â€
This true story, sadly, is no longer just an isolated case, and the really scary part about the modern escalation in eating disorders is that not only do the victims of this malady, together with their immediate families, but also the medical fraternity, still alarmingly tend to misunderstand, but also grossly underestimate the pernicious and pervading impact of this potentially deadly condition.
This being the case, what common key can be reined in to help with its early identification, analysis, and then effective long term treatment? Could the power of the expert analysis of the victim's handwriting be employed? Although attractive, the problem with this approach, is that the victim's case could already be too far advanced for action to be effective.
What IS true though, is that the handwriting of a person afflicted with anorexia (or bulimia) is, in parallel with their aberrant behavior, a virtual visible string of contradictions: If we were to examine a typical sample of the handwriting of the classic case of anorexia, we would be presented with what is aptly named “good girl†script – in that it is very rounded, and obviously over-controlled. This is often accompanied by a somewhat “jumpy†baseline movement and a disintegration of the way in which the individual letters themselves are formed.
It must be stressed, however, that if one sees what one perceives as fitting the foregoing description, it must not automatically be concluded that the person concerned is suffering from an eating disorder. There are MANY other factors and indicators to be taken into account, and the analysis must be left to an expert.