Eating Disorders and Social Phobia

To the Editor.—  We read with great interest the article by Halmi and colleagues¹ in which the lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders in a group of patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) was presented. Social phobia (SP) was present at some point in 21 (33.9%) of these 62 patients. The authors devoted relatively little discussion to having found such a high prevalence of this disorder in their sample. One possible artifact contributing to this may have been fear of eating in public. Since this is a specific exclusion criteria in the DSM-III-R,² we presume that this was not the focus of fear for these patients with SP. We found a similar high lifetime prevalence of SP not related to eating in public in a group of patients with bulimia nervosa (BN).³Fifty-nine normal-weight female subjects with BN were recruited for a treatment study and evaluated using the Structured