Stuart B. Murray, PsyD, PhD, is the Franklin Mint Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, where he serves as Director of the Eating Disorders Program and Director of the Translational Research in Eating Disorders Laboratory. His lab is dedicated to elucidating the mechanisms of symptom remission in eating disorders, developing novel treatment interventions, and advancing the recognition and treatment of male eating disorders. Professor Murray joins us for this third episode in our Big Ideas in Eating Disorders series featuring contributing authors to the book that Dr. Ruth Weissman and I co-edited. His chapter co-author, Jason Nagata, MD, MSc, is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, where his research focuses on eating disorders and body image in boys and young men.
In Chapter 3 of Weissman and Pike's Big Ideas in Eating Disorders, Murray and Nagata confront a blind spot the field has carried for decades: eating disorders in boys and men. For generations, the science, the screening tools, and the treatments have been built around girls and women, leaving millions of boys and men underdiagnosed, misunderstood, or invisible altogether. Muscularity-oriented disordered eating, they argue, doesn't just look different; it demands a different lens entirely.
That gap has real consequences. Murray and Nagata trace how diagnostic frameworks calibrated to thinness can miss the drive for muscularity at the heart of many boys' and men's struggles, and they make the case for what it would take, from research to screening to treatment, to build a field that sees all of its patients.
Join us for a behind-the-scenes conversation with Stuart as he unpacks the chapter he co-authored with Jason Nagata, the science behind it, and what it means for the boys and men the field has too often overlooked.
