This whole scene makes me think about the eating disorder epidemic during the Eighties. The first waves of patients were white, upper middle or higher class status young white women. The dieting and purging behaviors spread by social contagion, and a lot of teenage girls who did not have eating disorders tried it out. The cases of serious eating disorders also spread out beyond the original demographic, almost like a virus.

There was a rather sudden and dramatic increase in the number of eating disorder units in private hospitals, which competitively tried to entice doctors, psychologists and other private healthcare practices to refer eating disorder patients to them. For wealthier and more desperate families, more and more private residential eating disorder programs with famous psychotherapists on the staff sprang into being. Some of those persist, but a lot of the hospital based programs became less important and less numerous when the psych epidemic subsided.

There is definitely a strong capitalistic response to mental health epidemics that affect wealthier families.