Anorexia's Fallen Angel: The Untold Story of Peggy Claude-Pierre and the Controversial Montreux Clinic

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an associate professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University. She is the author of Nations Are Built of Babies:
Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

In Anorexia’s Fallen Angel, award-winning investigative journalist
Barbara McLintock documents the dizzying fall from grace of the
internationally famous Montreux clinic for the treatment of eating
disorders, which was founded by Peggy Claude-Pierre in 1999 in Victoria,
B.C. McLintock examines the growing media fanfare surrounding the
seemingly miraculous “recoveries” credited to the clinic, which made
it appear a last resort to sufferers and to their anxious loved ones
around the world—or at least those who could afford the intensive
residential care that started at $500 per day. She then carefully
considers what so often lay beneath the tales of victory over the
wasting disease that particularly attacks sensitive, intelligent young
women, often little more than children: that the “treatment” itself
had little in the way of scientific basis or monitoring; that neither
Claude-Pierre nor most of her staff were trained and qualified to
“treat” in any event; and that, contrary to claims made, there were
frequent relapses and even deaths among the young patients.

While the media sang the clinic’s praises, happily “advertising”
Claude-Pierre’s claims and bestowing celebrity status upon her, staff
members became increasingly wary and began to make public their concerns
about the clinic’s methods and their impact on its extremely
vulnerable, deliberately isolated, and often very young clientele.
Through interviews with some of these staff, as well as patients and
their families, and a variety of health practitioners, McLintock pulls
away the layers of mystique surrounding the clinic to expose the sham at
its core. As revelations of patient mistreatment and deaths increased, a
public inquiry was held, but Claude-Pierre and her husband closed down
only when it was obvious that their project was in a shambles and that
the media were now against Montreux.

McLintock’s handling of this controversial story is scrupulously fair
to both supporters and whistleblowers. In addition to the details of the
clinic’s rise and fall, readers are presented with the much larger
questions concerning the regulation of “private” medical
care—especially where “alternative” therapies are concerned—and
the media’s role in “selling” this sort of topical “feel-good”
story. The book, shocking as it sometimes is, also points clearly to the
absence of adequate, effective, and accessible medical interventions
that initially allowed Montreux to fill an obvious void and how that
void persists in the aftermath of its collapse, with continued
endangerment to the health and the very lives of those afflicted with
eating disorders.