Seed means severe, enduring eating disorder. Patients who have been unresponsive to treatment and meet the criteria for severe/uncontrolled anorexia or bulimia for something in the ballpark of a decade.

In my experience, there’s two distinct groups of ED patients. Some develop the behaviours as a response to a trauma. Food intake and their body is something they can feel in control of after an event has robbed them of that feeling.

Others are seemingly locked in to the disorder out of a desire to be needless. To quote Jenny Holzers poem, “my safety is in slightness..my pride is my denial..my victory is no gluttony, no guilt.

It’s like a very intense need to escape the constraints and shame felt at merely having a body with all its needs for food and rest and pleasures. The body is not recognised as the self, it’s a horrible lump they have to endure dragging around. Many seem to seek freedom from desire but rather than say, getting rid of material goods the way a Buddhist might, they seek to get rid of the material form almost forgetting that they go with it.

That desperate need to escape a body they find wrong, and the enduring belief in a self seperate from the body really rings true imo, listening to transgendered people talk about their bodies and the process of transition.