IF YOU HAVE AN EATING DISORDER

In February 1996, a benevolent throng of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other health specialists trekked to 600 college campuses to help young people suffering from a potentially fatal condition.

In those few days, they reached 20,000 students (mostly women) with severe eating disorders. Using educational materials and their own skills, the experts helped the students assess the extent of their disorders. They also learned how to identify the health-threatening warning signs as well as how to prevent illness. Screening results were kept strictly confidential.

Videos dramatized the problem. A questionnaire (presented later in this section) helped individuals learn whether they are at risk. The colleges had mental health specialists on site.

Eating disorders can and do kill. Some have death rates of up to 5 percent – higher than most of the other diseases that affect those aged 12 to 24 (with the exception of cancer). The eating disorders come in three varieties:

• Anorexia. The individual scarcely eats anything; body weight falls to as low as 85 percent of his or her ideal weight.

• Bulimia. Weight can approach normal, though the individual binges on large amounts of food and is obsessed with preventing the calories from turning into body fat. So the bulimic purges with laxatives, vomiting, and water pills and exercises heavily and constantly.

• Binge only. With this disorder, large amounts of food are eaten in short periods, with no purging. Overweight often results, without other major symptoms. The binge-only person takes control, for a while, slowly diets to “normal” weight, then binges and gains again.

This new battle against eating disorders is being waged by the National Eating Disorders Screening Program. It is an outgrowth of the National Mental Illness Screening Project, which began an annual program in 1991 to screen men and women for depression. The screenings, held each October and announced in Parade, may have saved thousands from suicide by identifying those with severe depression and helping them get treatment.

Dr. Douglas G. Jacobs, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a director of the screening programs both for depression and eating disorders. He has calculated that, as a result of the 1995 screening, 37,400 individuals with depression were referred for examination. And more than 1,000 persons were found to be so deeply depressed that they were hospitalized on the very day they were screened. “Most will feel better in 6 to 12 weeks,” Dr. Jacobs said, “thanks to good medical treatments. We hope to do as well with the eating disorders.”

Starting with the idea that some symptoms of eating disorders resemble some symptoms of depression, researchers theorized that drugs known to reverse depression might help treat eating disorders as well. Tests indicate that the medications do decrease the urge to binge. Physicians also prescribe group and individual counseling to control eating and to cope with the pressures to be thin.