Eating disorders awareness week!

[LightBulb]

I am really excited! As a local service project, my chapter sponsors Eating Disorders Awareness Week at my school every year. This year, we are teaming up with SAE! I want it to be really great. There is an eating disorders awareness speaker coming to campus two weeks before eating disorders awareness week (which I found out today), and we can hand out flyers and things to people going to the speaker to let them know about EDAW events. We will be participating in a 5K the Saturday at the end of EDAW, but I was wondering - what would be some other good things to do at our small college?

Thanks for the ideas!

[ThetaDancer]

What kind of events do you already have planned? Also, would it be possible to get the campus counseling center involved?

We didn't have an entire awareness week, but we did have a school psychologist do a presentation about ways to get help for yourself, and ways to help other people. Learning about ways to help other people was especially important to me because watching someone you care about struggle can be confusing and devastating and there's often a sense of helplessness.

After she presented, the psychologist also had these screening tests. Students could privately fill out forms that helped evaluate whether they had a healthy or distorted body image. After the forms were completed, the psychologist talked about services the counseling center offered.

I'm not sure I'm doing a very good job of explaining this, but you can PM me if you'd like more information!

[megahotmaureen]

So glad this is being brought up! My sorority, Delta Phi Epsilon, ANAD is one of its International Philanthopries! http://www.anad.org

[Cardinal026]

The NPC website has a link to information about the National Eating Disorders Screening Program. If this isn't already where you got the idea to do this week, then it'd be good to check out, there is a lot of information. I know that my school did this two years ago (maybe more often, I just only heard about it my junior year) so I'll e-mail the girl that was president of PHC then and ask her what all we did and let you know.

Website: http://www.mentalhealthscreening.org...ge/eating.aspx

ETA: There is contact information on that site - I'd try e-mailing them, they might be able to tell you what they know has been successful/eye opening on other campuses. Good luck!

[ThetaDancer]

^^^
That's the screening program I was trying to explain!

[LightBulb]

Awesome! Thanks, everybody!

We did get the counseling center involved on a preliminary event - we brought a speaker (a clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders and works with our local philanthropy) to campus a couple days before the week started. This was good because we were also able to give out flyers for the 5K. The topic was "Eating Disorders: Facts, Myths, and How to Help".

We also have been working on a positive self-image quilt. Because low self-image is a big factor in eating disorders, we had students make paper quilt patches with inspirational quotes or pictures. We are going to put it all on a big banner (quilt), laminate it, and hang it on campus.

I like the assessment idea though. Maybe we could do that next time or for a health fair or something.