Harriet Brown, a Syracuse University professor and author of "Brave Girl Eating," shared her personal experiences with eating disorders at a presentation, titled "I Know it Well," in Collis Commonground on Tuesday night. Brown addressed misconceptions relating to such illnesses, encouraged people affected to accept and treat their disorders and explained the impact that these diseases have on victims and their friends and families.
Brown acknowledged the particular challenges of dealing with an eating disorder while in college.
"I really like speaking to college students because I know how much pressure there was on me when I was a college student to look a certain way and be a certain way," she said. "I realize that these are difficult things to navigate."
Brown asked the audience to close their eyes as she read a passage from "Brave Girl Eating." She explained that she had often seen people with anorexia nervosa on the street and had been thankful that her daughter did not share this illness.
Anorexia affects about 0.5 to one percent of the population but many cases go unreported, according to Brown.
"People with anorexia have both a longing for and a fear of eating," Brown said. "They often believe that they don't deserve to be loved, and food is all they can think about."
Brown revealed that her daughter had been diagnosed with anorexia at age 14. Soon after her daughter's diagnosis, Brown said she discovered that she had unknowingly fallen prey to many of the disease's stereotypes and misconceptions.
"I decided to write this book because I couldn't believe the misconceptions about eating disorders that were out there," Brown said. "The things that I believed about them just weren't true."
The idea that people who have eating disorders choose to have them is at the base of many such misconceptions, Brown said.
"My daughter didn't choose to have anorexia she was in the grip of an illness," Brown said. "Eating disorders are not disorders of choice."
Brown said that certain genetic and biological circumstances help to determine a person's likelihood of developing an eating disorder.
"Not everybody can develop an eating disorder," Brown said. "There is an underlying neurobiology that makes people susceptible, and environmental factors can trigger it."
Today's environment is trigger-filled, and society has internalized a dieting culture, she said.
She later read a passage describing her family's journey from her daughter's first displays of anxiety around mealtimes to her eventual hospitalization.
"At some point, my husband and I realized she was avoiding eating at all costs," Brown said. "She ended up in the hospital malnourished and dehydrated with a heartbeat of only 30 beats per minute it should be 80 to 90."
Soon after landing in the intensive care unit, Brown's daughter began to recover.
"People recovering from eating disorders are incredibly brave because they're confronting their fear of eating with every bite," Brown said. "That's why I called my book "Brave Girl Eating.'"
Brown described the challenges of treating anorexia.
"The basic idea is that you can't choose to eat when you have anorexia you need people to override the voices in your head telling you not to," Brown said. "With this treatment, a close friend or family member's job becomes overriding those voices and creating a culture where a child has to eat."
Treatment is successful because it puts the responsibility for eating on someone other than the patient, Brown said. Despite the treatment's effectiveness, however, there is still danger of relapse. She said her daughter recovered by age 15 but is currently recovering from a bout of anorexia that occurred when she began college.
When audience members asked Brown after her speech what they can do to help those with anorexia, Brown said that awareness and compassion are key.
"When my daughter was hospitalized, the technician at the EKG said to her, You look so thin today how do you keep your figure?'" Brown said. "We need to stop the fat talk."
When a family member or friend has an eating disorder, it changes everyone's life, Brown said.
"It's an ongoing battle, but it's harder to sit around the table and pretend that nothing's wrong," she said. "If there's no happy ending, there's no unhappy one either, in my story at least."
The presentation was sponsored by the Center for Women and Gender, the Eating Disorder Peer Advisor Program and the Health Promotion and Wellness Program.
