Raising Awareness

Barnard College is currently hosting both the faculty-led Eating Disorders Awareness Week and the student-led Love Your Body Week, each designed to educate students about the dangers of eating disorders. That these events were not coordinated, despite being held simultaneously, created a minor controversy. While a coordinated series would have been preferable, the controversy should not obscure the broader point: that education is crucial to the fight against eating disorders. The students and administrators who organized these events should be commended for keeping eating disorders in the public eye, with the hope that they will work together more closely in the future.

An estimated 10 percent of late-adolescent and adult women suffer from at least some symptoms of eating disorders, which in the worst cases can result in immediate and long-term illness and disability, even death. In light of these harrowing statistics, eating disorders must be promptly addressed and properly treated. Both Barnard and Columbia have teams of specialists who evaluate students with suspected eating disorders and recommend follow-up care. As per the Americans with Disabilities Act, these specialists can go further and provide treatment only to those students who come of their own volition, except where a student is in immediate medical danger or believed to pose a danger to the community. Although those referred by friends generally cannot receive direct treatment from the University’s specialists, students should encourage their peers to seek help when necessary. As such, they should be taught to recognize potential symptoms. Since anorexia is often characterized by denial, raising broad-based community awareness is among the most effective means of addressing eating disorders.

For that reason, any attempts at education are welcome and necessary. But it is unfortunate that students and administrators scheduling near-identical series of events for the same week did not better coordinate their plans. More importantly, future events should not be confined to Barnard’s campus. Columbia students, too, suffer from eating disorders—and Columbia’s women, in particular, are no less susceptible than Barnard’s. Columbia has multiple online resources dedicated to educating students about eating disorders, but holding events on both sides of Broadway would contribute to that effort. Columbia and Barnard have strong, multidisciplinary programs for treating students with eating disorders. Those programs will be made more effective, however, when students and administrators involve each other in their awareness campaigns. Eating disorders can become a problem for any student—Columbia and Barnard, male and female—and must be treated as such.