Abstract

Anorexia Nervosa is regarded as the deadliest of eating disorders (EDs) and mental illnesses. It is characterised by self-imposed beauty standards that lead to harmful behaviours, including reduced food intake, vomiting, and over-exercising. Although the medical, psychological, and psycholinguistic domains have shown a rising interest in it, there is a lack of investigation into anorexia nervosa from a discursive perspective. Most discourse-based research into it has focused on pro-ana communities. To the best of our knowledge, no study has been conducted on digitally-based discourses on individuals with anorexia nervosa at different phases of their illness and, specifically, on the Reddit social media platform. This paper presents a Corpus-Assisted Social Media Critical Discourse Analysis (CA-SMCDA) of a digitally-based corpus of venting posts sourced on Reddit to shed new light on how anorexia nervosa sufferers linguistically construct and negotiate their illness-based identities in Social Media Sites (SMSs) and exploit the role played by Reddit in allowing the development and proliferation of certain ideologies concerning anorexia nervosa that influence people’s discourse both in online and offline environments.