Eating Disorders in Professional Men: The Hidden Epidemic
By Dr. Philippe Jacquet, Prof | Jungian Analytical Psychotherapist, London
You are successful by any outward measure. You perform at a high level professionally, you meet deadlines, you manage teams, you are the one others depend on. And yet, in private, your relationship with food – with your own body – has become something you would never name to a colleague, or perhaps even to yourself.
This is the reality that brings many professional men to my consulting room in London. Over more than 25 years of clinical practice as a Jungian analyst specialising in eating disorders, I have worked with a specific type of client: high-functioning, driven, outwardly composed — and inwardly at war with their bodies. What I consistently observe is a pattern that remains almost entirely invisible in mainstream clinical and cultural conversation. Men with eating disorders are the hidden epidemic of mental health.
This article draws on my doctoral research completed at the University of Essex (Jacquet, 2025), which represents the first Jungian analytical investigation into male eating disorders with a specific focus on the father-son relationship. My aim here is not simply to raise awareness — it is to give language to an experience that too many men are suffering in silence.
“Men with eating disorders are the hidden epidemic of mental health — high-functioning, driven, outwardly composed, and inwardly at war with their bodies.” |
The Scale of the Problem: What the Research Tells Us
Eating disorders are widely assumed to be a female concern. This assumption is clinically and statistically false — and it is costing men their health, and in some cases their lives.
Research indicates that between 10 and 25 per cent of all eating disorder presentations occur in males (Sweeting et al., 2015). Emerging evidence further suggests that rates of eating disorders in men are increasing at a faster rate than in women, with no significant difference in clinical severity between the sexes (Mitchison et al., 2014). And yet treatment provision remains almost entirely designed for women. NHS NICE guidelines have historically offered no male-specific treatment pathways, and the diagnostic criteria in use prior to 2013 were developed overwhelmingly from research on female populations.
The consequences of this gap are serious. Too often, men with eating disorders are missed, underreported, or misdiagnosed – their symptoms subsumed under adjacent presentations such as depression, addiction, or anxiety. Many do not seek help at all. The cultural narrative of masculinity — the expectation to be strong, self-sufficient, emotionally contained — makes it extremely difficult for men to identify themselves as someone with an eating disorder, let alone reach out for support.
The relationship between masculinity norms and psychological distress is stark. Research reviewed in my doctoral thesis shows that 96 per cent of eating disorder studies identified a correlation between cultural expectations of masculinity and increased suicide risk (Bennett, Robb et al., 2023). Globally, 66 per cent of suicides are attributed to men (Tyminski, 2019). These are not abstract statistics — they describe a pattern of men suffering deeply from an insufficiently valued inner life, often without a clinical framework that speaks to their specific experience.
Why Professional Men Are Particularly Vulnerable
In my clinical experience, the men most likely to present with an unrecognised eating disorder are those functioning at the highest levels. They are executives, lawyers, physicians, traders, entrepreneurs – men who have built their identity substantially around achievement, control, and external performance.
This is not coincidental. The same psychological architecture that drives professional success — perfectionism, an intense relationship with discipline and control, an orientation toward external validation — can also underlie a disordered relationship with food and the body. The body becomes a domain in which the same relentless standards are applied: it must be controlled, optimised, managed, and if it falls short of an internal image, punished.
Over years of clinical work, I have observed that many of these men describe feeling, at a deep internal level, somehow ‘less than’ — less interesting, less capable, less worthy — despite their external accomplishments. This split between the performed self and the inner experience is, in Jungian terms, a dissociation of the shadow. The body becomes the site onto which these unintegrated feelings are projected. And the eating disorder — whether it manifests as restriction, bingeing, purging, obsessive exercise, or orthorexia — becomes the means by which this inner conflict is unconsciously managed.
“The body becomes a domain where the same relentless standards are applied — it must be controlled, optimised, managed, and if it falls short, punished.” |
The Father-Son Relationship: A Depth-Psychological Perspective
My doctoral research makes a specific and original contribution to the field: it shifts the theoretical focus in male eating disorder treatment away from the maternal relationship – which has historically dominated psychoanalytic thinking on this subject – and towards the father-son relationship as a central organising dynamic.
Over decades of clinical work with men with eating disorders, I observed a consistent pattern. These men were frequently disconnected from their fathers. Their fathers, in turn, were disconnected from their own bodies and emotions, and were often driven professionally. The son, lacking a father who embodied what it means to live comfortably within one’s body, was left without what I describe in my research as a ‘living symbol’ of masculine embodiment.
In Jungian terms, this is the failure of the father archetype to function as a positive initiatory presence. Where this fails, the son is left to construct his identity — and his relationship with his body — without adequate symbolic grounding. What I describe as the Kronos Complex captures the more extreme end of this dynamic: named after the Greek titan who devoured his own children, it represents the internal psychological force by which a man’s critical, tyrannical relationship with his body turns against itself. Like Kronos consuming what he feared, the mind attacks the body it cannot trust or inhabit.
From this deprivation, a compensatory structure emerges – what I term Body Number 2. Drawing on Jung’s own concept of his ‘Personality Number 2’, I describe Body Number 2 as the idealised imaginary body that a man creates to compensate for the perceived inadequacy of his own. It is typically lean, muscular, young – and utterly unattainable. Its numinosity means it functions less as a goal than as a talisman: if only he could achieve it, everything would be alright. But it remains forever out of reach, and the pursuit of it becomes a compulsion that locks him into the disorder.
The Male Eating Disorder Matrix: A Clinical Framework
To bring clinical structure to these depth-psychological observations, my doctoral research developed what I call the Male Eating Disorder Matrix — a four-position framework for understanding the unconscious dynamics that present in the consulting room when working with men with eating disorders.
The four positions within the Matrix are: Shame (OD1), which addresses the internal experience of inadequacy and the inability to articulate emotional distress; Identification and Blueprint for Development (OD2), which explores what the son has internalised as a model of masculinity from his father; Father Figure (OD3), which investigates the actual relational dynamics and their transferential echoes in therapy; and Power Struggle (OD4), which captures the competitive and often destructive dynamic that can emerge between father and son, and is strongly represented in the Kronos myth.
These four positions are not sequential stages but interconnected dimensions of a man’s psychological experience. In clinical practice, they manifest through the transference — in what the patient brings to the room, what he cannot say, what he enacts, and what surfaces in the analyst’s countertransference. The Matrix provides a framework for a therapist to navigate this complexity with a specifically male client in mind.
“Shame, unexpressed and uncontained, does not simply disappear. In the body of a man who has been taught that vulnerability is weakness, it goes underground — and it manifests somatically.” |
Shame: The Core Affect Beneath the Disorder
Of all the dynamics I observe clinically, shame is the most consistently present and the most consistently hidden. The professional man who presents for therapy has typically developed an extraordinarily sophisticated set of defences against shame — defences that have, until this point, served him very well professionally. He has learned to perform competence, to project authority, to manage how he is perceived. Vulnerability is experienced as dangerous.
And yet shame, unexpressed and uncontained, does not simply disappear. In the body of a man who has been taught that vulnerability is weakness, it goes underground — and it manifests somatically. The eating disorder is, among other things, a bodily expression of shame that has no other language. The restriction, the purging, the bingeing, the compulsive exercise — these are not failures of willpower. They are adaptive responses to an internal world that has never been given adequate space.
Part of what makes Jungian analytical therapy particularly suited to this work is its orientation toward the symbolic dimensions of experience. It does not pathologize or reduce – it seeks to understand what the symptom is trying to communicate. The body is not the enemy in this framework; it is a messenger. The eating disorder is not simply a dysfunction to be corrected; it is an expression of something in the psyche that has not yet found another form.
Seeking Help: What to Expect from Jungian Analytical Therapy
Men who have spent years not seeking help — either because they did not identify with the category of ‘eating disorder’, or because seeking help felt incompatible with their professional identity — often arrive in the consulting room at a turning point. Something has happened: a health crisis, a relationship rupture, a moment of recognition that the coping mechanisms are no longer working.
Jungian analytical therapy offers a specific kind of depth-oriented relational container for this work. It is not a quick fix, nor is it primarily symptom focused. The aim is not simply to modify behaviour around food — it is to explore the deeper dynamics that the behaviour is expressing, and to begin the long process of integration. What does your body mean to you? What did your father’s body communicate to you, explicitly or implicitly, about what it means to be a man? What is the ‘ideal body’ you are pursuing, and what would it give you if you achieved it?
These are not abstract philosophical questions. They are clinically generative — they open access to material that behavioural or cognitive approaches may not reach, and that is often at the very centre of the disorder. My practice at Harley Street and across my London clinics is specifically oriented toward this work with men.
“The eating disorder is not simply a dysfunction to be corrected. It is an expression of something in the psyche that has not yet found another form.” |
You Do Not Have to Manage This Alone
The professional men I work with are among the most capable, determined individuals I encounter. They have survived and succeeded in demanding environments, often while carrying a private burden that has never been spoken about. That capacity for resilience, properly supported, is a genuine clinical resource.
What eating disorders in professional men require is not willpower – they already have that in abundance. What they require is a clinical space in which the deeper dimensions of their experience can be safely explored, named, and gradually transformed. That is the work of depth psychology. And it is the specific work I have dedicated more than 25 years of my clinical career to.
If you recognise something of your own experience in what is described here – whether for yourself or for a client – I invite you to be in touch.
Book a Confidential Consultation with Dr. Philippe Jacquet in London +44 (0)3333 392 430 | info@philippejacquet.co.uk | www.philippejacquet.co.uk |
