Unpacking recovery talk: Applied linguistics and anorexia recovery narratives

Narrative therapy has been widely used in the study of eating disorders (EDs), in line with a trend in therapeutical intervention (not limited to eating disorders) that has successfully probed patients’ reports of their illness and recovery journeys in an attempt to better understand them and improve treatment outcomes. Recently, interest in recovery narratives has increased, not least because ED sufferers, and especially anorexia patients, often show ambivalence toward recovery—a factor that leads to high relapse rates. In light of this, investigating the linguistic features characterizing, respectively, the discourse of former anorexia sufferers who have successfully recovered, and of those who are still struggling, can help identify linguistic cues that may contribute to assessing patients’ attitudes towards recovery. This paper examines the discursive construction of illness and recovery in anorexia stories from Reddit’s r/AnorexiaRecovery, where recovering ED sufferers engage in conversation with their peers, often with the aim of finding support or solace (henceforth, ‘struggling recovery posts’), and ED-focused medical websites featuring full recovery stories (‘successful recovery narratives’). By analyzing recurrent lexical and syntactic features, this corpus-based study compares how ambivalence toward recovery is negotiated in successful versus struggling recovery discourse.