What we don't talk about when we talk about "mental health matters"

Why do we avoid the topic of eating disorders? What does it mean to live with one? What does it mean to die from one?

There’s been a huge push towards talking about mental health in recent years, especially with the global pandemic sky-rocketing the rates of depression and anxiety. While some of the conversations this has sparked have proved helpful to increasing accessibility of interventions such as talk therapy via telehealth, psychiatric medications—which, contrary to the current administration’s archaic viewpoint, can prove not just life-altering but life-saving, particularly for individuals dealing with more heavily stigmatized mental health disorders such as schizophrenia or bipolar depression. Discourse, and even the “crippling depression memes” show we, as a culture, have at least inched away from the days of unhappy wives undergoing local lobotomies and Sylvia Plath’s silent, scentless, senseless, carbon-monoxide suicide. Women, always women in particular, and the mental and physical health issues that disproportionally affect them, are put to bed in backrooms, diagnosed with all manner of modern or historical hysteria.

Pseudo-awareness, tied up in grossly misused buzzwords all over the internet, TikTok in particular, where product-pushing individuals assert that every ex is a narcissist, every compliment is love-bombing, and any inconvenient or upsetting is trauma, it becomes a problem to parse the level of pathology assigned to the human experience. The same assertion that we, as a society, should be talking about panic attacks, or feeling too apathetic to brush our teeth for weeks, and even the traffic circle between sobriety and addiction, discussion of eating disorder remains surface-level, aimed at Bella Hadid and Barbie, and fails to educate those who are unaware of just how pervasive a disease like anorexia nervosa can be.

Every time I attempt to educate others about the experience of life with an extreme, disabling eating disorder—every single time—I get an email. I get a kickback. “Help if available, someone is concerned, call this hotline, talk to someone.” It glitches every time, no matter which option I select. I am twenty-eight years old. Telling me to “get help” is equivalent to spitting in my face. What help? People who watched me grow up, teachers, trusted club sponsors who spoke so highly of my precocious promise, quietly judge my aging parents for “allowing” me to deteriorate at an unlivably low bodyweight. To this I raise the challenge; if I were your daughter, what would you do with me? You can’t know. You can never know. I get told to cover up, don’t scare the children. Don’t go out in public. Yes, people are. Yes, I receive messages that I should be ashamed of myself any time I share a photo online, even of my face. I am not championed in recovery spaces. There are no spaces for people like me. Harm reduction, taboo in the world of addiction, remains unthinkable to most except in very protected subsets of the medical literature for eating disorders. People who claim to love me tell me this is what I chose.

Let me be clear; anorexia is not a choice. I would have chosen anything else.

Talking about mental health, even on the very rudimentary level that we are, is still progress. That being said, when we leave out individuals with “uglier” mental health issues such as schizophrenia, manic depressive, anorexia, bulimia, and the entire spectrum of eating disorders, people who are visibly struggling in ways that make the average person uncomfortable, we deny these individuals their humanity. We otherize and ostracize people who may not possess the kind of recovery capital necessary to live full lives according to narrow, traditional definitions. Conversations about mental health should not exclude anyone. People must be given permission to exist in community, regardless of the feelings this may be bring up in the community at large. Everyone deserves agency, even if makes you angry.

Everyone’s story matters.