Quote:
Originally posted by carnation
These parents know but feel powerless to help, short of hospitalizing their daughters. One mom has been blaming the high school cheer coach for her daughter's illness; it's certainly true that the cheer coach weighed them in front of each other every couple of weeks and announced their weights to shame them into losing weight. I think there's a special place in hell for that coach.
The other family lives down the street and their daughter looks like a skeleton with skin pasted on it. She used to be on the high school volleyball team with BlazerCheer and Ballerina and she was a great player. She goes to Valdosta and last year her sorority played against theirs in intramural volleyball. She's been far too weak to play this year and it used to be her favorite activity.
Baby Berry and I saw her right before recruitment and neither of us recognized her.
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If they are over 18, it is very hard to force hospitalization. If the girls are under 18, the parents can have them committed to a hospital. If they are over 18, either the girl must decide to have herself hospitalized or the parents must prove that the girl is a serious danger to herself (which seems like a no-brainer, but this can be very difficult within the legal system). That said, if there is any way these parents can get these girls in the hospital, they need to do it. I've never heard of a case where a girl recovered from a serious eating disorder on her own. These girls will either struggle with eating disorders for the rest of their (shortened) life, or die due to complications from the e.d. It's definitely not something that they should be ignoring.
That said -- it's so unfortunate, and frustrating, that only the girls who are visibly disordered are getting attention for their anorexia. For every girl who looks like a walking skeleton, there are 20 more who are doing things just as harmful to their bodies but aren't nearly as thin. This was a frequent topic of conversation at one of the eating disorder boards I visited -- the attention given to the visibly ill girls just reinforces the disorders of those who aren't as sick, and they feel that they are never going to feel noticed/validated until they are as sick-looking as those girls. Parents rarely notice until their children are VERY ill. I struggled with eating disorders on and off for six years, and the only time my parents noticed that something was wrong was for a few months when I was at my very worst. (And we were a family who ate dinner together most nights, etc., so it's not as if they were the type of parents who saw me so little they didn't even know what I looked like, let alone what I was doing on the weekends or how I was spending my time.) I never got sickly thin, although at the height of my disorder I was pretty tiny, and people did comment. I knew a number of other anorexics in my high school, including one who ultimately died of complications relating to the disease, and none of them looked like skeletons either. And of course bulimics tend to be normal to overweight, so size is not an accurate predictor there, either.
Parents really need to pay attention to their daughters' (and increasingly, their sons') relationships with food these days. Weight isn't really an accurate measure of the harm they're doing to their bodies, and it's very hard for girls today to go through adolescence without acquiring some screwed-up body image to varying degrees.
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