Family is at the core of recovery

"In other cases with poor parent-child relations, children use means of starving themselves to take revenge, hoping their parents will feel guilty when seeing their skinny bodies," Chen says.

That explains why even the standard treatment for eating disorders involves multidisciplinary treatment, including professionals in nutrition, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, international medicine and social work. The patient's family is always at the core, according to doctors.

Treatment includes talks with the patient alone and with the family to help parents find the reason for the onset of the disease and make changes.

A university student from Shanghai who went to a school elsewhere says that one reason she was afflicted by anorexia accompanied by amenorrhea two years ago was because her mother kept asking her to lose weight.