Male anorexia and bulimia nervosa: Disorder symptoms and impulsive behaviour during hospital treatment and one year follow-up period.

BACKGROUND: The study aimed to evaluate treatment efficacy in male patients with anorexia (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) treated at the Eating Disorder Unit, University Psychiatric Clinic Ljubljana, Slovenia (EDU UPCL), using longitudinal assessments of eating disorder (ED) symptoms and selected impulsive behaviours highly correlated with these entities from hospital admission till twelve months after. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: 35 male AN and 35 male BN patients were included. Participants were aged 17 or more and somatically stable with the BMI>12 kg/m(2). Patients with psychiatric comorbidity, mental disorder due to a general medical condition, or serious somatic or neurological disease were excluded. Intensity of ED symptoms and presence of selected impulsive behaviours were evaluated at hospital admission and discharge, and three, six and twelve months after, using an internal Eating Disorder Unit Questionnaire. For statistical analysis multivariate analysis of variance was used. RESULTS: Throughout the research period the appropriate changes in BMI were observed in both patient groups. In both, AN and BN patient groups, the evaluation of longitudinal differences regarding the intensity of all ED symptoms and the presence of studied impulsive behaviours showed a significant decline at discharge and all subsequent assessments compared to the results obtained upon admission to the hospital. The re-hospitalization rates of patients with AN and BN in the first year after discharge from the hospital were 3.84% vs. 3.7% respectively. CONCLUSIONS: In male patients with AN and BN treated at the EDU UPCL, ED symptoms, BMI, and studied impulsive behaviours show a substantial improvement during hospital treatment. These changes seem to be long lasting, still being effective through one-year post-hospitalization follow-up.

From aggressiveness to creativity.

Psychology has a long tradition of considering human creativity as a distinct human characteristic and a special kind of human activity. After explaining the key motives for such an attitude, the author discusses those forms of healthy aggressiveness that stand out as necessary and constitutive elements of the creative process. Taking the well-known statement of C. G. Jung's 'The person who does not build (create), will demolish and destroy' as a starting point, the author compares the basic premises for understanding the process of human creativity, at the same time drawing on Freud's psychology of the individual and Jung's principle of the collective unconscious as well as his notion of 'complexes'. In doing so, the author somewhat boldly paraphrases Jung's dictum: 'In order to be creative, rather than just constructive, one must occasionally also destroy'. With reference to Wallas, Taylor and Neumann (Wallas 1926; Taylor 1959;;Neumann 2001), the author goes on to explore those concepts which help us to investigate the phenomenon of human creativity, drawing distinctions between emergent, expressive, productive, inventive and innovative creativity. The second part of the article discusses the importance of intelligence, originality, nonconformity, subversiveness and free-mindedness for the creative process of human beings. The author concludes with a further explanation of Erich Neumann's argument that human creativity cannot be understood solely as a result of sociogenetic factors, and argues that it is only by taking into consideration Jung's perception of creativity that a global ontological understanding of these processes can be achieved.