Though Penn did not participate in National Eating Disorder Awareness Week — which runs from Feb. 20-28 this year — some students have that sense of awareness every day of their lives in college.
Penn’s campus mirrors nationwide statistics, said Denise Lensky, the associate director at Counseling and Psychological Services. “As many as 10 percent of adolescents and young adult women nationally suffer from eating disorders, and about 10 percent of people with eating disorders are male.”
“Many people with eating disorders are particularly talented, high-achieving, perfectionistic people,” Lensky explained. “And Penn is a school that attracts those types.”
As on other college campuses, “bulimia in general is more prevalent than anorexia,” she added.
While anorexia and bulimia in particular can be diagnosed, not all disorders are so readily apparent.
Subclinical eating disorders — where a person struggles with some symptoms but doesn’t meet the full criteria for diagnosis — are prevalent on college campuses. However, they are “very significant and could hinder a person’s development,” Lenksy said.
Furthermore, “a lot of people who don’t fit the stereotype of what people with eating disorders look like will often get overlooked,” said a female graduate student, who wished to remain anonymous due to the personal nature of the subject.
The student said because she does not conform to the traditional, “waifish,” appearance associated with eating disorders, she had a difficult time securing professional help for her disorder.
That lack of recognition, along with the stressors of life at Penn, can often exacerbate eating disorders in college, she said.
Students who suffer from eating disorders at Penn find that their college experience is significantly altered.
Struggling with an eating disorder “makes social situations more difficult, and it makes the experience” of university less full, School of Social Policy and Practice graduate student Ashley Arens wrote in an e-mail.
“When you spend all your time focused on calories, binging, exercising and hating your body, you have very little time to make friends, join clubs or even live,” she added.
Standard activities like “navigating cafeterias can be enormously stressful,” Lensky added.
The daily habits of students with eating disorders are often what initially concern friends and other guardians.
A College sophomore, who wished to remain anonymous because she had an eating disorder in high school, said her experience heightened her awareness of the difficulties of others around her.
“It makes it really easy to spot other people with the problem,” she said. Behaviors like not eating with everyone else, talking a lot about food and unusual patterns of weight loss have alerted her to some of her friends’ issues.
However, she added, “when you see other people who are going through something similar, you have the impulse to revert” to disordered eating.
While she was unaware of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, she expressed hope that Penn would do more to raise awareness of eating disorders on campus.
“I don’t think people talk about it enough,” she said. “People need to be more aware that the things they say and the standards they hold are not necessarily healthy.”
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