Eating Disorders: How Aware Are You, Really?

Hey everyone, I’m back again to tell you more about eating disorders. For an overview about what they are, see my last post. To recap, eating disorders are a medical issue when a person’s diet and relationship with food is severely damaged in some way. There are four categories of eating disorders: Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge-Eating Disorder, or Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorders (OSFEDs). They can cause a person’s body to rapidly deteriorate to the point of death, if not treated.

Last post, I didn’t talk much about treatment for eating disorders, so that’s what I’m going to talk about now. According to Akron Children’s Hospital, treatment for eating disorders “focuses on helping kids cope with their disordered eating behaviors and establish new patterns of thinking about and approaching food.” This means that the affected person is being coached to think more positively about food and its purpose as nutrition, not to be abused or deprived of. There are different types of treatment: short-term inpatient, partial inpatient, intensive outpatient, and outpatient care. These can be combined or used one after the other, like a timeline. First is short-term inpatient, which is used when the patient is too physically or psychologically unstable to be home, and needs to receive medical help and/or therapy everyday. Then there’s partial inpatient care, where the patient needs to be at the hospital often, but isn’t a danger to themselves if at home. After that comes intensive outpatient, which means that the patient is home full-time, but receives medical and therapeutic help on a regular basis. Finally, there’s outpatient. This is when the patient has reached a much more stable relationship with food and life, is becoming much healthier, and is just in therapy, usually once or twice a week. Throughout the recovery process, it’s estimated that about 168 hours per month are invested in healing. However, sometimes treatment for these disorders are hard to get. In fact, less than half of people with eating disorders actually get the help that they need, with the statistics going as low as only 6% of patients getting treatment (this rate for bulimia, specifically). Part of this is due to people’s unawareness of what eating disorders are and how dangerous they can be. It’s also sometimes due to lack of health insurance to be able to pay to get checked into inpatient care, for the sometimes required medical tests and medicine, and therapy.

There also seems to be a stigma around eating disorders due to a lack of knowledge. I conducted my own survey, distributed to SLA students via the advisory memo and direct confrontation, and asked about how much the students know about eating disorders, how aware they are of their prevalence, how they learned about eating disorders, and how they see them in our community. The answers were downright dreary. Of the polled students, almost 70% have known someone with an eating disorder, and 22% have had one. That’s crazy, that eating disorders are so common, even in our own community. I also asked about what eating disorders people have heard of, the majority being Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa. This shows that awareness for eating disorders is low, to the point where only one or two disorders are widely known. Wake up, anorexia isn’t the only eating disorder! To see exactly how people think, I asked the recipients what comes to mind when someone says “eating disorders”. The most popular answers were: “Anorexia and Bulimia”, “skinny girls”, and “overeating”. This shows that people have a very one-dimensional view of eating disorders.

To see how students felt about eating disorders in our community, I asked about what they knew and felt. On a scale of 1-5 (1 being “I disagree completely” and 5 being “I agree completely”), students were asked to rate how much they agree with a statement. Most rated a “4”, for whether or not they feel eating disorders are a problem in our community. What’s outrageous is that not a single student said that they completely disagree that eating disorders aren’t a problem. That means that every student to take my survey thought that eating disorders are at least a little bit of a problem in the SLA community. Most people also rated a “2” on the statement “Students are well educated on eating disorders.” Therefore, the majority of students who took my survey think that we should learn more about eating disorders. I agree with this, because I have never, in any health or eating course, learned about eating disorders. I was never talked to about eating disorders, I learned about these disorders from a book and the internet, like a large number of my surveyors. Most of the people who took my survey also agreed that eating disorders aren’t talked about enough in our community, which I personally agree with.

As you can see, I and other members of the community feel that eating disorders are an under-communicated about problem. Eating disorders aren’t talked about much in our community, meaning that the only information people get about eating disorders, if any, is from their own research and the internet. Shouldn’t we be learning about this stuff in school, or from our parents? How can we know how bad these things are for us if we barely even know what they are. If someone finds out about bulimia, but doesn’t know all the consequences, they may think that it’s okay to get food out of your system in those ways. This needs to change. Therefore, I am going to raise awareness for my Agent of Change piece of this project. I intend to make one or two posters to hang up in our school, talking about eating disorders and their statistics, and to make a video. This video will talk about my own experience with eating disorders, as well as what they are and treatment for them. I will also include help resources for any struggling. I intend to show this video, perhaps at a grade-wide advisory if possible. Tune in next post to see how this all goes!