#EDAW17

[mindcharity]

Many people think that eating disorders are rare, something that only affects young women or people under a certain weight. But according to the NHS, over 6% of people struggle with eating problems. Thats more than 1 in 20 people.

Young, old, male, female, big or small. It could be someone with you at work right now, someone sitting next to you on the bus, someone in your family or even yourself.

Today is the start of International Eating Disorder Awareness Week, and to do our part we are sharing information and stories to help people get better informed. Can you help by sharing too? Go to www.mind.org.uk/EDawareness for more info.

[ieatyourhatelikelovezine-blog]

#1

It was through my eating disorder that I started to learn to cut off parts of myself, whole parts of my body and my personality. Because that’s what an eating disorder feels like, it starts to feel like your body is taking up all this room that you’re not worthy of but then you need to cut off more and more and more. It’s never enough until you’re all gone. The problem is you never feel like you’re going to need to recover and one day you might need it all back.

The absolute kicker came when I realised that I wasn’t just at the mercy of what was deemed clinical disordered eating that induced such a feeling of ridding myself of excess parts of me. But I was at the mercy of an entire structure that determined I shrink myself and mould into the shape of a perfect woman. Expected to perform womanhood in everything from how much I weighed, how I dressed, how I related to men, what I wanted from relationships, whether I wanted children. Because gender is a performance, and as I began to recognise people saw me as growing into an adult woman I also began to recognise my queerness, my need to find meaning in ways that didn’t focus around heteronormativity, the family unit, in my ‘choice’ of labour, or generally in the trajectory that my life was supposed to follow. People are expected to perform binary gender roles and perform well, and I believe that it was partly under this weight in which I collapsed.

This morning, I began to start the long process that it takes for me to get ready. I know that the psychiatrist makes notes about the way in which you dress, whether you paint your nails, whether you’ve shaved, whether you wear make-up, and that this provides information as to where you are in your recovery. When I arrive at the Eating Disorders clinic, I am greeted by several women’s magazines. I go to the mirror and check I look like the women on the cover for they provide a marker as to what is acceptable. Though should I have a similar body weight, in this setting, I will be told I am coping poorly.

I then consider what I should do in order to make sure my problems are correctly received by the psychiatrist waiting for me, I practice what to say. I think about what people with eating disorders are expected to say on autopilot and I regurgitate this because failing to meet the criteria for this might put my treatment in jeopardy. I ask about my medication and this question is directed to the gatekeeper of my wellness, my psychiatrist, the person who has the power to allow or deny me access to the treatment that I need.

I come home with a headache and I think about the irony in which I am expected to perform a personality and appearance and how failure to do so may result in different treatment and - at worst - further diagnoses. But also about how those expectations create the conditions for my mental health problems. I think about the way in which women are expected to stay quiet as we perform double, triple, quadruple labour burdens and I think about how I’m going to get the energy to simply text anyone back.

I think about how this would feel, to be forced to access treatment when not only were you asked to perform gender, but also to perform and conform to a different culture. White supremacy has enforced its brand of gender roles through colonialism. It’s now well documented that people of colour are not only suffering eating disorders at high rates, but are being failed by professionals to recognise symptoms because they may show up in different ways to white people. At the same time, people of colour are sometimes medicalised and often othered for not conforming to western culture.

I feel tired and with all my energy gone, I sit down for the day to do some work and write this post. I make sure I look okay before anyone comes home.

[mindeduk]

How will you be socking it to eating disorders today? https://www.b-eat.co.uk/

[hannah-bhoff]

Thoughts of an eating disorder: 

Tuesday

Normal thoughts: I need a good breakfast to give me enough energy to do well in that exam later.

ED thought: There is absolutely no way I can have breakfast today if I want to do well in that exam later. 

[paintedimagining]

Grab your #SockItSelfie! It’s Sock It to Eating Disorders day! Simply grab your silly socks and text EDAW17 £3 to 70070. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook share a photo with us using #SockItSelfie. Help us reach our £50,000 target! I have! https://www.b-eat.co.uk

[mindcharity]

You’re not alone. Go to mind.org.uk/eatingproblems

[ieatyourhatelikelovezine-blog]

ED awareness isn’t good enough for marginalised people

It’s important that as a feature of these #EDAW2017 blogs I talk about inclusivity in eating disorder awareness. So far, the majority of awareness conversations, infographics and campaigns are based around Anorexia Nervosa and include images of thin, white, cisnormative bodies that meet western beauty standards. Firstly, Anorexia Nervosa diagnoses only makeup 10% of ED diagnoses. For those unaware, eating disorder diagnoses currently include Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, OSFED, Binge Eating Disorder, Pica, ARFID, UFED and Rumination Disorder as per the DSM 5. Anorexia also includes 2 types: type 1 is Restricting Type, type 2 is Binging-Purging type. Though it’s really important to say at this point that we shouldn’t be wed to the DSM too much, as I’ll remind you that at one point homosexuality was a considered a ‘mental illness’ and being trans still is. So if you don’t fit into these categories, it doesn’t mean you aren’t suffering. Secondly, regardless of the coverage of eating disorders that suggest EDs remain in the domain of the thin, white, wealthy, cishet woman, this is far from the truth. Holding on to these stereotypes isn’t just annoying or inconvenient for people who fall outside of this category; it is deadly because they don’t get the support they need when they need it.

Focusing awareness around one type of eating disorder suffered by one type of person isn’t progressive and it’s not awareness. When I was on the decline into an eating disorder, I remember feeling like a fraud for complaining or going to my doctor to tell them I was struggling because I wasn’t ‘thin enough to have an eating disorder’. I’m aware that this is a common theme amongst people with EDs and I can’t speculate about all the reasons why. It could be in part that with an ED you might feel like you can never ‘be thin enough’, but I think it’s reasonable to assume the stereotype of someone with an ED really contributes to that feeling. At least that was the case with me, desperately searching for someone I could identify with in awareness campaigns or in the stories that charities relayed, but I struggled to find myself. The thing is, I did conform to a lot of the stereotypes and I still didn’t feel that I deserved or warranted any help and I did meet doctors that felt the same based on their lack of knowledge and most likely pervasive stereotypes.

What about when someone who knows that their thoughts about eating, food and exercise are damaging their wellbeing, but they’re a person of colour? Trans? Above the “healthy” BMI range? Weight is absolutely not an indicator of how ill a person is. There is no way to look like you have an eating disorder because an ED causes issues with your thoughts surrounding food, and therefore we need to widen our discussion about what it means to have an ED.

Here’s some information regarding identities that exist outside of the stereotypes:

·         “A recent study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that transgender youth are four times more likely than their cisgender, heterosexual, female peers to report a diagnosed eating disorder and twice as likely to report abusing weight loss pills and engaging self-induced vomiting.”  (Teen vogue doing some good feminist shit there.)

·         In fact, “In a survey of college students, transgender students were significantly more likely than members of any other group  to report an eating disorder diagnosis in the past year.” 

·         In one study, gay and bisexual boys reported being significantly more likely to have fasted, vomited, or taken laxatives or diet pills to control their weight in the last 30 days. Gay males were 7 times more likely to report binging and 12 times more likely to report purging than heterosexual males. 

·         While research indicates that lesbian women experience less body dissatisfaction overall, research shows that beginning as early as 12, gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens may be at higher risk of binge-eating and purging than heterosexual peers. 

·         It appears that despite heavily entrenched stereotypes, EDs affect people from different socio-economic backgrounds. It is not limited to the middle/upper-middle classes. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1k70k3fd

·         Teenage girls from low-income families are 153% more likely to be bulimic than girls from wealthy families. 

·         People of colour suffer from eating disorders, and here’s a fantastic blog summing up how and why they might suffer and be under-represented much better than I can This is important because “A 2006 study found that clinicians were less likely to assign an eating disorder diagnosis to a fictional character based on her case history if her race was represented as African-American rather than Caucasian or Hispanic,” (taken from this post) and you bet this translates into real life.

·         NEDA’s website shows “Black teenagers are 50% more likely than white teenagers to exhibit bulimic behavior, such as binging and purging.”

·         15% of gay and bisexual men and 4.6% of heterosexual men had a full or subthreshold eating disorder at some point in their lives

·         A study of 2,822 students on a large university campus found that 3.6% of males had positive screens for ED. The female-to-male ratio was 3-to-1 (Eisenburg, 2011).

·         Subclinical eating disordered behaviors (including binge eating, purging, laxative abuse and fasting for weight loss) are nearly as common among males as they are among females (Mond, 2014).

·         It’s not just young people who suffer – “From 1999 to 2009, hospitalizations involving eating disorders increased for all age groups, but hospitalizations for patients aged 45-65 increased the most, by 88 percent. In 2009, people over the age of 45 accounted for 25% of eating disorder-related hospitalizations.” 

Belonging to a marginalized community does a number of things: it causes the conditions for more trauma and stress and of course, these things can lead to mental health issues that clear the way for unhealthy coping mechanisms like an ED. It also, from my own and others experiences, creates a more intense feeling of wanting to try harder to fit in with societal norms. This is possibly a crude way of putting it, but for me, my thought processes went a little like: “okay, I’m bisexual and this puts me at a disadvantage, therefore as a trade-off I have to try harder to conform in another aspect”. This doesn’t mean it’s the same for everyone, though I definitely experienced this myself.

Please consider the above when you’re raising awareness, because the narratives that surround EDs have a huge impact on who receives treatment. Yes, awareness campaigns aren’t the be all and end all, but it’s a start, and so our language and actions need to be inclusive and thoughtful.

[ieatyourhatelikelovezine-blog]

Thinness is not a rent you pay to exist

Every Wednesday I have a therapy session at the ED clinic I attend weekly. I am an outpatient now, so this means largely going recovery alone. I am lucky that, despite a very tricky gap from inpatients to outpatients care, I ended up with a fantastic therapist. The thing is therapy like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is tricky because it’s based on the assumption that thought processes are faulty and thus need to be altered in order to perceive reality correctly. To its credit, mostly CB therapists don’t believe that everything is wonderful and you’re too ‘ill’ to see it, rather that some things can be average or even bad but your perception of them might make these things intolerable or that you only see the worst in situations where there can be good. This is extremely useful, especially in EDs where we tend to put an inordinate amount of thought on our weight, shape or appearance and CBT can help us shift our focus to other places.

There is a problem, though. I remember very clearly during treatment that a healthcare professional told me that it’s not out of the ordinary for a woman to be concerned about eating out at a restaurant for fear of gaining weight. Now it wasn’t like I hadn’t been fully aware of the absolute metric fuck-tonne of body-hating bile spilled by corporations and mass media designed to make you want to despise every inch of yourself enough to spend as much as you can on their products or services (think gyms, think plastic surgery, think beauty products). But perhaps through an eating disorder, it truly dawned on me that the problems it created were so endemic that it was hard to prise apart the experiences of someone with a diagnosis of an eating disorder and someone without. I have relatives who go to the gym obsessively, who talk to me about food nearly the whole time we are together and who would never even consider their behaviour disordered or problematic, no matter how much psychological stress they are clearly under from the amount of time needed to take out of their day for this, never mind being constantly hungry. As I began to look around, once I was confronted with the supposed ‘abnormality’ of my behaviour in my diagnosis, I saw disordered eating in many people that I knew in many different forms. In fact, I had had severely disordered eating up to 2 years before my treatment began but hardly anybody noticed because I hardly stood out, I mean why would I? Everyone else was doing it.

I am not the first person who has been enthusiastically congratulated, repeatedly might I add, on what was a very unhealthy body size. People I didn’t even know would gush at the sight of my body. (I like to really refrain from making any references to my size to prevent reinforcing stereotypes about the ‘typical’ person with an ED, but in this context it’s necessary.) However, as I have been overweight in my life as well, I am very familiar with the disgusting fatphobia that accompanies having a larger body. I used to get asked if I was pregnant, given unwanted tips on weight loss, get shouted at in the street and spoken to badly by customers at work as well as facing systemic oppression such as unhelpful treatment by doctors and very rude healthcare staff.

So we can see from the above that according to western beauty standards, it’s simple: thin is good, fat is bad.

So my question then, and unfortunately my unresolved question now, is how do I go about recovery in a world that doesn’t want me to recover? How do I go about recovery when it is accepted that feeling hatred towards your body is very widely accepted? And yes, whilst men do get eating disorders, it’s important to recognise that many of these are members of the LGBTQ community, and despite their underrepresentation, women of colour not only get EDs at high rates but they often aren’t diagnosed or treated appropriately. These are people who are told that their bodies don’t fit with white western beauty standards. If you are told that your body doesn’t belong, doesn’t fit, needs to be changed then yes, people may respond with disordered eating and at what point do we consider this an absurd response? Is it at all? I don’t think so. Now this isn’t to say that eating disorders are the correct and only response and in no way is this an attempt to trivialise the serious issues of people whose eating behaviours are particularly damaging to their wellbeing. However, I am attempting to illustrate the extent to which problematic eating behaviours manifest themselves more widely than just simply in the minds of those diagnosed with an eating disorder.

Don’t get me wrong, the body positivity movement can be of great help, but often it is still focused on ‘beauty’ or what is ‘beautiful’. It is still very body focused.

So yeah, I can say go seek out some body positivity and maybe you should, but it seems like such an individualistic response. Fuck blaming a phantom, omnipotent “media”, the “media” isn’t politically influenced by itself, it’s politically influenced by capital. Money. Capital that needs YOUR capital to thrive. Capital that needs you to feel bad about yourself, enough to spend money, enough not to feel like you’re worth anything more than a shit job in terrible conditions, a terribly maintained rented accommodation, £28,000+ tuition fees. Capital that needs you to dislike yourself, your body, your power and everything that it represents.

So how in good faith can I commit to recovery by changing my thought process surrounding this? Because I’m right aren’t I? The evidence is there. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying, it means I’ll assess the ways in which to do so, and I think that means tearing down the very institutions that make people feel like I do, and maybe like you do.

[ieatyourhatelikelovezine-blog]

Fuck Hunt and Fuck Neoliberalism

Well, blog #2 wrote itself and this one is directed at you, Beat. I know that charities are desperate for funding, and thus have to pander to whomever they can, but I felt that Beat ("The UK's leading Eating Disorder Charity") having Jez Hunt come to their Eating Disorders Awareness Week event was unforgivable. Tweeting quotes from him such as, "Improved mental health treatment can make a real difference..." with an accompanying picture to add to his photo op collection was frankly embarrassing.

  For those unfamiliar with Jeremy Hunt, he is the Conservative Secretary of State for Health, who has sustained horrendous attacks on our National Health Service since 2012TM . So far, he is the man who has overseen a "humanitarian crisis" in the NHS and not one, but multiple strikes in the wake of his ghastly contract negotiations for junior doctors. Bolstered by media who continually demonise NHS staff and the people who access it, Hunt and the rest of his Tory mates, have managed to successfully create and sell a narrative around the oversubscription to the NHS and it’s lack of funds, which has seen him er, further under-fund the NHS. This is having a horrific effect on mental health trusts, which have seen annual cuts of £598 million (£598 million each year) between 2010 and 2015, so 8.25% in real terms. Last year, The Guardian reported waiting lists of up to three years in eating disorder services, all of which is Hunt’s doing. Here’s some more lovely stats:

 -         Rates of depression and anxiety among teenagers have increased by 70 per cent in the last 25 years.

-         Almost 19,000 teenagers were admitted to hospital for self-harm in 2015/16, an increase of 14 per cent since 2013/4 and 68 per cent across the last decade

-         The number of young people admitted to hospital with eating disorders has risen by almost the same amount in the past three years

-         In 2016, 19.7 per cent of British people reported experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety, up from 18.3 per cent the previous year.

-         40% of NHS trusts saw cuts to mental health services across 2015-2016.

-         More than half (56%) of school leaders say it is difficult to find mental health services for pupils, and more than one in five (22%) who attempt to find support are unsuccessful. 93% say that pupils bring more worries into school than they did five years ago.

-         The most common barriers to finding appropriate support described by respondents were a lack of capacity in services (36%), lack of local services (31%) and budget constraints (28%).

-          A recent government report found: - Only ¼ of people who require MH services have access to them - Services themselves are not designed for people who are distressed, as navigating them is difficult

  Yes, see, this is a man who literally wrote the book on the privatisation of the NHS (you can purchase this here), and is currently attempting to under-fund the NHS in tandem with whipping up a furor about the pressure on our services that is rooted in xenophobia and out and out racism. It is through this method he can discredit our health workers and services and thus bolster support for selling off private contracts who are 'more able' to support us through competition. This is classic neoliberalism, and in very, very basic (oversimplified) terms, this is an economic system which seeks to shrink the state and create deregulated global markets for private companies to trade accompanied with massive tax cuts (basically, it’s real bad for the working classes).

  There are many reasons why eating disorders and poor mental health as a whole is political and I will continue to shout about this. But I know that Jeremy Hunt and his brand of conservatism is at best dangerous and at worst deadly for people with eating disorders. This problem is cyclical, for the exploitation his political framework relies on create and uphold the oppressive conditions for eating disorders and poor mental health to flourish (shit working conditions, gender roles, racism etc see last blog and my zine), they also manage to tear away all the support systems that previous (even conservative governments) had been forced to put in place and keep. The tory government as we speak is sneaking through legislation to prevent 150,000 people with mental health problems accessing the disability benefits they need to live.

 Beat's campaign is one that wants to "Ensure all GPs are able to refer eating disorders sufferers to treatment without delay" (Beat Petition, 2017), but pray tell, how are GPs going to refer people for treatment when:

1. GP appointments are so hard to get because they’re underfunded and overworked

2. Eating disorder services barely exist because of cuts and the demand for them has risen over the last three years

Now, it's not that I'm unable to see what's going on here. I know that charities need funding and thus they have to appeal to everyone and anyone to get the support that they do, but this is too far and is in direct contention with the aims of the campaign. It's not that I put my faith in charities; after all, I believe it is working class solidarity and not charity that gets the goods. But I DO expect more from an awareness campaign, especially from a charity that claims to lead in the UK. I feel like I shouldn't be putting my energy into tearing down a charity, but I think this demonstrates the catch 22 that we get into when we refuse to see and accept the politics in mental health. The effects of neoliberalism on mental health can be seen across society, in job centers, in workplaces, in universities and even the utterly ‘apolitical’ BPS (and other associations) have been forced to release a statement begging the government to stop their welfare sanctions.

  Thing is, a-political campaigns are utterly fruitless because what they do is assimilate into the cultures that are the architects of what they're campaigning against. I mean, it's clever really, isn't it? Charities create an illusion of democracy, a warm fuzzy feeling, stick on some socks and make a difference. But I'm asking you to think critically about what you support, and how you support it because an organization's failings won't always be as obvious as a public figure like Hunt walking on stage at an event.