On WEDAD 2025: My Journey and the Urgent Need to Break the Silence Around
Eating Disorders in the Middle East
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On WEDAD 2025: My Journey and the Urgent Need to Break the Silence Around
Eating Disorders in the Middle East
On WEDAD 2025: My Journey and the Urgent Need to Break the Silence Around
Eating Disorders in the Middle East
By Carine El Khazen
When I began my clinical work in Dubai over two decades ago, I never imagined
that eating disorders would become the heart of my professional mission. At the
time, terms like anorexia or bulimia were rarely mentioned in Arab societies.
These illnesses were dismissed as Western problems, teenage phases, or
attention-seeking behaviors — if they were acknowledged at all.
But the reality was very different . I met adolescent girls hiding food,
parents desperate for answers, young men bingeing in silence, and patients
misdiagnosed with depression or anxiety because no one was looking beneath the
surface. Each clinical encounter echoed the same question: “Why is there no one
who understands what I’m going through?”
Binge eating is normalized in many Arab cultures — encouraged even — as a
marker of hospitality, masculinity, or family bonding. As a result, compulsive
overeating often goes unrecognized, misdiagnosed, or dismissed entirely.
Similarly, I’ve worked with veiled women experiencing profound body
dissatisfaction and body avoidance, yet without the language or permission to
speak about their distress.
When I established the first multidisciplinary outpatient program for eating
disorders in Dubai in 2017, there was no roadmap. No culturally adapted model,
no regional training, no existing teams. What we had was a deep commitment to
provide care that was evidence-based, structured, and tailored. Over time, the
program became one of the few internationally recognized CBT-E centers of
excellence, and I began to witness something powerful — recovery, when the
right care was finally in place.
What was missing wasn’t will . It was knowledge, access, and training. That’s
why I became a fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED), where I now
contribute to global efforts to shape clinical standards and training
frameworks. It also gave me a platform to bring the needs of our region into
international conversations — to say, “We exist. Our patients are here. And
they deserve to be seen.”
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of organizing five
international eating disorder conferences in the UAE, bringing leading voices
like Daniel Le Grange, Janet Treasure, and Ulrike Schmidt to share knowledge
with our region’s professionals. After the Beirut port explosion in 2020, I
offered free training in CBT-E to colleagues in Lebanon and Qatar. Today, I’m
preparing to launch a culturally sensitive online CBT-E training in Arabic,
designed for psychologists, psychiatrists, dietitians, and physicians across
the Middle East and North Africa.
And yet, despite all of this, the gap remains wide. There are no specialized
treatment centers in the entire Middle East. Few professionals have received
adequate training. Male patients often remain undiagnosed due to bias.
Adolescents are dismissed as dramatic or disobedient, and families are left
with no roadmap.
Emerging studies show that the prevalence of eating disorders in some Arab
countries now rivals that of Western nations. But access to care remains
scarce. The region also faces additional layers of complexity — from religious
fasting to generational trauma, from the normalization of extreme body control
to the invisibility of body distress in veiled populations.
Eating disorders are not a passing phase. They are complex, deadly, and deeply
misunderstood illnesses — but they are also treatable. With the right care,
people do recover. But that care must be specialized, compassionate, and
grounded in evidence.
Training psychologists, physicians, and dietitians in specialized,
evidence-based treatment is not just a medical necessity — it is a social and
human imperative. It is the only way we can give our patients what they
deserve: a real chance at recovery.
On WEDAD 2025, I share my journey not to speak of achievement, but to advocate
for action. Let us break the silence, raise the standards, and commit to
breaking bias — wherever it hides.