Happy Eating Disorder Awareness Month!
Not a very common greeting card.
I must admit, I have my reservations about “awareness” as a catch-all concept. Mental health awareness. BPD awareness. Gay right awareness. Bullying awareness. It all seems well and good and I’ll obviously never be ANTI-awareness. But is it actually helpful? I’m just not sure. And my own personal journey with an eating disorder is one of the main reasons I feel this way.
Nowadays, the whole concept of eating disorders is as common, familiar and even (sadly) popular as braces: we all know many, many, MANY people who had (or have) them and most of us either had them at one point or kind of toyed with the idea of getting them. 10 to 15 years ago, when I was a teenager, things were very different. Eating disorders definitely existed but they were not nearly as common and there was a basic understanding that taking things too far was NOT okay.
Now bring in the awareness movement. Everyone listen up! Eating disorders exist! They are NOT okay!
Huh. Well. We all knew they weren’t okay. And it’s not harmful to clarify that or raise the topic to give some people affected by it a sense of community.
However. Awareness is a double-edged sword. The more you spread the word… the more the word spreads. Suddenly, what had once been the domain of a few was no longer a secret at all. Suddenly, the “secret” went from being a strictly dark one to one that was getting A LOT of light and attention. Website after website sprung up promoting “thinspo” (fucked up pro-anorexia or pro-bulimia propaganda). Celebrities gave tearful confessions in droves – and for every sob story they told of being so anorexic they made themselves cold on purpose to increase calories burned, you can guarantee 100 girls only heard one part of the message: “Extra cold means burning extra calories.” I know that the more I learned/heard about anorexia, the more anorexic I got. The more tricks I learned, the more I internalized the lesson “This is what gives me my identity, this is what gets me noticed.”
Do you see what I’m getting at? While I have no problem at all with awareness campaigns in the sense they are meant to be taken, it must be acknowledged that there is always another way of taking them. Bringing awareness to a topic puts it in people’s minds. That’s the point. But depending on the topic, that is not always a positive thing.
Consider the following:
The National Eating Disorders Association started in 2001 as an amalgamation of two existing eating-disorder awareness societies. Basically, in the late 90s, EDs started to get big-time serious attention because people felt eating disorders were becoming dangerously prevalent and should be addressed. Now let’s look at some pop culture female icons of the 1990s:
Anyone remember these ladies?
Or these gals? (side note: marry me please, Joss Whedon)
Or this famous dynamic duo? (side note: godDAMN, Xena is a fox)
Now flash forward to the pop culture icons of millions of teenaged girls today:
Huh.
Oh dear.
Well, thank GOD we became aware of the problem before the idea of skinny = pretty completely took over the media, eh? Oh wait… yikes.
Our current approach to ED awareness is clearly not working.
I’m not saying the answer is shut up about it already. But unlike cancer or MS or many of the other diseases with big ‘awareness’ campaigns, mental diseases are often adopted as coping mechanisms for extremely difficult circumstances. So they only cloud the water, so to speak, and often fuck up an already fucked-up situation by taking attention AWAY from the actual problem. What are the odds those problems would be better addressed by focusing on them rather than on the coping mechanisms people develop for them?
Specifically, eating disorders aren’t about eating (duh). They’re not about bodies either. They’re not about weight, measurements or calories. They are about inner self-loathing and an unmet need to be accepted/loved. The body is simply an outlet for the actual problems inside. Obviously. So why exactly are we putting so much effort and attention into the outward signs of what is actually a deep-seated and extensive societal problem affecting us all?
The core problem is self-hatred. The core problem is feeling afraid, of feeling like life is scary and beyond your control. The core problem is isolation, feeling cut off from others and any sense of community. The core problem is “I will do anything to stop this feeling.” It can be stopped in a billion ways: drugs, drinking, OCD, eating/body image disorders, anger issues, etc. etc. etc.
We’ve wasted decades already focusing on the wrong problems altogether. I just think we need to be doing a lot more to address the actual human needs and fears – as uniting factors that affect us ALL – rather than putting so much time, energy and money into addressing each little specific branch of a massively fucked-up tree. Know what I mean?
Cat xxxx
Half of a Soul - Life with BPD 
ABSOLUTELY AWESOME post! I’ve never had an eating disorder, but as you say, the same points apply to lots of different aspects of ‘mental health awareness’, and you could probably replace ‘eating disorder’ with ‘self-harm’, for example, and write much of the same post….if I wasn’t so damn paranoid about people identifying me from my comments on your posts, I would share this with everyone I know and encourage them to share it too, and would hope you go viral! (Although of course, you may share my paranoia!). 🙂 IF ONLY this is what mental health awareness was all about. Awesome awesome awesome – your words SO needed to be said…… xxx
Thank you, StillHiding! 🙂 I give you full permission to share this with whoever you want, but of course I understand the ‘hiding’ part. I am getting better at believing that one day I could share this blog with people I know in “real life.” Hmmm we’ll see. I seriously doubt any of them would ever, in a million years, a) come across this, and b) realize it was me, so that’s fine.
I first had many of these thoughts when I was forced to encounter a kind of ED help group. We had no more in common than your average mentally ill individuals, but because we expressed our problems/fears/insecurities in the same way we were supposed to compare notes? How is this helpful? All of us just sat around judging the other girls on how much they weighed (or didn’t weigh) and thinking endlessly about food and our obsessive disorders since that was the only topic for our group …??? Very bizarre version of “help” in my opinion – did more harm than good by far.
Thanks for commenting, love! xxxx
p.s. Suddenly just had the best mental image of Xena and Gabrielle high-kicking all the twiglets in the photos below them hahahahahaha – whoops. Ahem.
I was talking to one of my friends about eating disorders today. She was thinking about starving herself to help cope/get attention for her real problems. I was like “no, don’t do that.” I explained that all it really is is another form of self harm. She was a cutter, and I told it’s even worse than that because you can damage your body permanently and potentially die. Eventually one of my friends who used to struggle with anorexia dropped in on the conversation. She was like “trust me, been there done that, it’s useless.” After that my friend who was thinking about doing it decided not to. Needless to say, it’s seriously messed up that people feel like they need to do things like that because they don’t have/refuse to use mental health services.
Thanks for reading, heatherplant! Yes, I agree completely – it is useless (and worse, harmful). All you end up doing with those “tools” (anorexia, self-harm, etc.) is hurting yourself and hoping that finally, this is what will make somebody care for you, make you feel loved. The real problem in a nutshell? People already do care, but they will never care ENOUGH because you don’t care about yourself. Sometimes I get so frustrated that it took me almost 20 years to even begin to realize that. Your friend is lucky to have you to talk to xxxx