Bariatric surgery is often criticized as being “the easy way out.” Let me tell you first hand, there is no easy way out of morbid obesity. Sure, weight loss surgery helps you get the excess weight off faster and more successfully, but that doesn’t make it easy.
Welcome back to The Bypassed Life’s new series, “The Crazy in Us.” Today I want to talk about a serious trend in post-operative life: suicide. I’ve spoken briefly on the topic before, but it’s a topic that deserves more attention.
Basically, some research has found higher than expected rates of suicide among weight loss surgery patients. The reasons for this trend remain unclear.
Welcome to a new series at The Bypassed Life: The Crazy in Us. Over the coming days and weeks, I’ll be taking a look at the psychiatric issues that affect weight loss patients, both before and after surgery. Make sure to check back in.
The first part of the series examines the presence of psychiatric issues in the morbidly obese and in candidates for bariatric surgery. The morbidly obese individuals have a higher incidence of mood disorders.
Continue reading ‘The Crazy in Us: Pre-Op Psychiatric Issues’
Bariatric surgeons only operate on the digestive tract; they do not touch the brain. Psychological issues are just as much, if not more, of a problem after surgery. One manifestation is in eating disorders. On the ObesityHelp message boards, I have seen many posts by individuals with disordered eating, and many that likely fit the strict diagnostic criteria for eating disorders. There’s scale obsession, rumination (chewing, then spitting out food without swallowing), licking food, anorexia nervosa, and bulimia nervosa. It’s all there on the boards. It’s sort of a dirty little secret of the bariatric community. (Man, we have a lot of those!)
