Eating Disorders Awareness Week activities “got very little action and attention” this semester, according to Mary Commerford, director of Furman Counseling Center at Barnard.
Students’ silence speaks to disordered thinking that characterizes the disease. “The nature of eating disorders ... is that there’s a big period of denial,” Commerford said. “Literally ‘I’m doing this, it’s normal, I don’t have a problem.’” It’s easier and more successful, she said, to hold events on
related issues, such as body image and perfectionism.
In 2006, the National Eating Disorders Association conducted a poll on college campuses across the country and found that nearly 20 percent of all students admit to having or having suffered from an eating disorder. While other similar studies have produced varied findings, “college is consensually considered to be a time of elevated risk,” said Julia Sheehy, associate director of Furman and coordinator of its eating disorders treatment program.
It is widely acknowledged that anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
Pressure cooker
For Katie, a recent Barnard graduate whose name has been changed to keep her identity anonymous to potential employers, the college environment exacerbated an existing problem.
Katie arrived at Barnard after battling an eating disorder throughout high school, and initially thought she was fine. It soon became apparent that she was not.
“I had thought that a lot of my problems with not eating were based on being at home with a really controlling family,” Katie said, admitting, “In high school I wasn’t really getting better, but I wasn’t dead so I thought I was OK.”
She explained, “School kicked in and you’re away from home and everything’s different. It became clear to me very fast that my problems were still there even though I was in a different location.”
Though she could not pinpoint a reason for the perpetuation of her disorder, Katie cited the “high-pressure” college environment as bad for people with eating disorders. She described the mentality at Columbia as one of, “how far can I push myself without collapsing?”
Not only did this perception feed into Katie’s problems with eating, but it also debilitated her self-esteem. “It took me three years to figure out that I was just as smart as everyone around me,” she said. “My first stress response is like, ‘you’re fat.’”
Like Katie, Henry, CC’ 09, who requested to have his name changed due to the impact this article may have on potential employment opportunities, also found his arrival at college had a negative impact on an eating disorder that originated in the ninth grade and left him underweight.
“I felt like I worked so hard to get into Columbia, and I had certain expectations of how that was going to play out,” he said. “When those expectations weren’t met, I felt like I had no control over the experience.”
Starting in the winter of his first year, Henry began experimenting with diet pills, cocaine, and laxatives. He didn’t get treatment until the spring of his sophomore year, after family members confronted him about it.
Starving the beast: treatment
For Katie, “there wasn’t so much a rock bottom.” But she recalled several incidents that stood out over the years that are “not all clear at this point ... I was sort of out of my head at the time,” she said.
“I didn’t want people to think of me as the girl with the eating disorder,” she said. “I wanted to be the girl ... who did volunteer work, and I was majoring in English. I didn’t want it to be attached to my identity.”
Katie remembers one day when she was so antsy from her hunger during class that she left to get a smoothie and came back 15 minutes later. “It was so rude,” she said, that it needed an explanation. She confessed to her professor after class.
On another occasion, Katie didn’t turn in a paper because she fell asleep due to self-starvation.
“If you don’t reach out for support you could be anorexic and no one would know,” Katie said. “I went to my RA and was like ‘oh shit!’ What should I do?” In her first year, Katie ended up at Furman Counseling Center, where she met with a therapist and was referred to a nutritionist as well. “I gathered so much strength from this woman,” she said of her therapist.
“Our treatment recommendations are specific to each student’s symptoms and needs,” Sheehy said. “Some students benefit simply from participating in short- term psychotherapy and related health services on campus. Others most benefit from ongoing care off-campus, which we help arrange. Some benefit most from taking some time off from college and receiving care at a treatment center.”
Henry didn’t find his treatment at Columbia’s Counseling and Psychological Services as rewarding. “I’m pretty picky about the people I’ll talk to in therapy,” he said. “When I feel like they’re not smart enough, I feel really irritated.” He found it easy to evade questions during therapy that he did not want to address. And even after telling them he was dodging their inquiries, “they seemed incurious.”
“I could have easily skipped out on things, because there would have been no follow-up,” he added.
Henry also felt as though he didn’t have any “revelations” in therapy because he was always “pretty self-aware” of what he was doing and why he was doing it. Nevertheless, he stuck to it for a semester.
“This time I wanted to deal with it, so I wanted to hold myself accountable,” he said, adding that most of his destructive behaviors have gone away over the past two years.
Katie emphasized that, “you have to decide to get better... you have to decide every second and every single meal.”
But both she and Henry indicated that no matter how successful treatment is, some aspects of the illness linger.
“I don’t think you’re ever over it,” Henry said. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to have a normal relationship with food because ... I was so used to seeing it as a source of antagonism.”
“It’s a mental illness with very dire consequences.”
