I came across this organization through social media, but I was able to set up a meeting with one of their lead psychologists to learn about the organization and its process, and it was very helpful. I got her consent to record the video and share it on my student blog. She gave me verbal consent, and you can see it in the video recording I am going to add; however, this interview or meeting took place in Spanish, so I will be taking notes in English on all the important points.
- She is doing her master’s as well, and her undergrad research was in EDs, so she had to go through the process of making sure everything was done with informed consent and that she understood how it all worked.
- I asked her about the process in this investigation and where her interest in this specific subject matter came from; it started when she began her degree in psychology, which is also where her own therapy process began, and she also did her internships with this specific population.
- From a young age, she was always in judgment about diet culture as well as wellness and personal; she suffered a lot from fat phobia, and she started to learn about the terminology and the way that there is a direct correlation with ED’s and the behaviors that come with it, and the system of hormonal eating she wanted to learn more about it, and now she is working in helping people in their process through anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and in general people with a complex relationship with their body and food. (Clearly, she couldn’t talk to me about her specific clients because that would be an ethical breach of confidentiality, and everyone’s identity and experience should be kept private, so she works a lot with women who have suffered through any gender violence, and there is a connection between trauma and ED’s. She also works with people who have some neurodivergence and has seen it more in people who have autism, with the idea of selective foods and that behavior. Still, she is aware that there is a relation between ADHD and forgetting to eat, but also binge eating because they do not know how to read their own internal signals and are not aware of them, so there are times when they forget to eat, go to the restroom, drink water. (This was something I asked about because through my own journey in my treatment center in Spain I was told that there is a strong correlation between my ADHD and my Bulimia as well as the forgetting to eat and not feeling hungry and I was curious to see if this is a hypothesis that they had in Peru where she is working as well and she expresses how there are other ways in which she has seen it. )
- There aren’t many treatment centers in Peru/Lima because Peru is very centralized around the capital, not other areas. The places that have these services have a lot of cases against them and even some that have been proven; testimonies that are public about violence in those spaces. She would not recommend any of these centers. While completing her degree, they tried to teach her that the treatment for eating disorders is very similar or should be treated differently.
- What they do is they are a psychotherapy treatment center, and they center around the context for the conduct of the eating disorder. This is therapy of acceptance and compromise, which works very well with ED’s and body image struggles, and this is a program where there is work with psychiatrists as well as nutrition; it is not just psychological treatment. The family also participates in the process, and there are barriers because at times the family does not want to participate. They don’t feel comfortable going to a psychologist who tells them they have to lose or gain weight; they need to control and manage with food, and it is challenging, but it is what they do, and they have good results and have only been working for one year.
- It is still a very closed subject that a lot of people still do not speak about, especially in Medellin. There are a lot of large misconceptions still around eating disorders, and the one she considers the biggest one is that people believe EDs are only about food and eating habits. They are so much deeper than this; in the end, some people have problems with cognition and identity: who am I if I don’t have an eating disorder? Parents sometimes have ideas when they are told that their child is sick that there is no eating disorder because their child eats. Another is that, in their household, they only eat healthy foods (Orthorexia). With some of her friends, she feels that she has disordered eating because she does not fit into any of the boxes, and they say that she eats. They don’t see her as anxious, and it is not necessarily something to do with her size and body; if there is no extreme thinness or the word that she does not like to use, obesity, they are not taken seriously. There are a lot of professionals who think that the only thing that determines if someone has an ED is their BMI, when this has been proven to be false, but this was not even created to measure weight. Still, because someone in statistics developed it and it wasn’t adapted to Latin America, it was only measured in white European men.
- She thinks fat phobia comes from racism because a straight-sized white European body is thinner. Still, the enslaved people who came from Africa who got to Latin America had a different body, and this comes from racism and also capitalism and the idea that when we are going into recession there needs to be more simple clothing, such as only sizes. I am going to charge you more when you have a larger body because I have to justify my form of production. Now, with Ozempic and GLP-1s, different doctors are saying that, in the name of health, which is not true, they need to lose weight when investigations are saying that Ozempic and their similar medicines can lead to cancer, but you are not told this. Bariatric surgery and becoming anemic, as well as being people who have higher rates of suicide because they don’t find themselves when they see each other in the mirror; the process of adaptation of your hair falling out and broken nails, and it is romanticized as something you have to go through to drive at looking beautiful and being pretty.
- Social understanding and learning are important for conversations about how we relate to bodies, and how young girls are told to tuck in their stomachs and behave around food. Double moral of don’t leave the plate empty because then there is shame around the kids in Africa not having anything to eat, but also the pretty girls are thin. They have to be quiet and pretty, and from a young age there is a double standard of seeing parents and mothers who are always on a diet, also the ones that serve the food but don’t eat, men saying that you have to be thin or no one is going to like you, social media saying that the fat friend who is nice or funny, and the thing girls are the only ones who can have a successful partner. They are doing the fat girls a favor when they are with a cute man. In her own household, there was a lot of fat phobia, and when she was around 11 years old, for her Christmas present she got a subscription to the gym, sports clothing, and at that time she would have loved anything else. The age at which people go through different trends or behaviors around eating habits in Peru has been going down; now children as young as 11 are affected. Sometimes it is about being thin, or there is a lot of pressure because their bodies are growing and changing. There is discrimination based on gender, as well as homophobia and sexism. Some of the insults include: you look like a boy, you are probably a lesbian because you have small boobs.
- I asked her specifically about using design in my project and what she thinks I should do, since I don’t want it to be only my experience. She said first it is about trying to sensitize, and how she was at other centers and did content about psychology surrounding the ED’s. There were a lot of teenagers saying what this is, showing it to their friends, and thinking about who I want to reach because the signals of risk can be seen beforehand, and making people conscious about what it could look like: a commercial campaign and asking questions about what you have felt. A small checklist about if you should ask about getting psychologists help and getting some testimonies and seeing different ones not making it sad and saying how it evolved and how it had different consequences and maybe having a guide for people who are surrounding people with Eds for example a family member, friends, partners and teachers just the people that are around them for them to know how to act and understand instead of judge.
- She has been in a process with someone whose partner has an ED, and instead of asking them to get better, try different foods, and try to get better, she asks herself whether this person is willing to accept this. There is not a lot of consciousness around ED; we take it in a very personal way and take it as if they are trying to change something about their body specifically, without knowing what the limits of the help are. She has around 7 clients that she is helping out, and she works with one other psychologist that sees more cases of bulimia and anorexia, and she is more involved with bulimia and binge eating.
- There is a lot of pain because, for there to be complete recovery, there needs to be a lot of luck in finding the right treatment, but apart from there not being a lot of services, there is also the fact that there has to be enough money. She thinks that there is the possibility for recovery even though there are some people who say you can never get fully recovered she thinks it is because maybe they have not received the appropriate treatment and the help they need because in the university she had a teacher who taught this and according to her you can never be cured but she thinks this is a myth because this is something that is different to everyone in therapy treatments and not all Eds are the same she says that this does not mean that you will not get the thought that you dont like the way you look but this are thoughts that will show up but recovery is knowing what you want for yourself and what you want in your life and getting close and what is valuable in order to continue and it is similar to suicidal thoughts or tendencies is that there are going to be moments in your life when the idea will show up but the being able to indentify it and not act on it is recovery especially considering that society is still going to be fat phobic and but large pressure on diets and the systems that predate them and that this are systems of oppression and that we can name them but we can’t get out of them but we can sensibility and educate as well as fight against it and being destructive and this is why eating disorders are suggested to look at very different processes and looking at different versions of it. This gives you flexibility to work creatively and think outside the box, and this is very important.
- Personally, she feels a lot of pain when someone is interested in being part of the process, but doesn’t have a support system and can’t pay for the entire process. She would like to have thousands of processes at a health care price. It is important to recognize that professionals also get tiered. They can burn out and spend a lot of energy pushing against the structural barriers a person may face. She stopped seeing young adults, and the ED was a part of intra-familial violence. To cover her treatment every week, she sold clothing and desserts with her mother, which shows compromise, and the commitment that all patients have toward the process is important to consider. They decide to get better, and it is difficult because they are getting uncomfortable and going against the voice in their brain and the pattern they are used to.
- I verified one last time if it was okay that I added these notes to my blog, and she said it was okay; whatever I needed.
- One thing that made me think a lot was the fact that I am myself in treatment, and I have never had to worry about how I am paying for it and the effects it might have on my household. Still, it made me think about the impotence that a family member or a parent might have, knowing that this is something that is going on and that they might not have the means to help their family member, and what to do in that respect, as well as a person who wants to get better because this is not something that health insurance covers in most cases and apart from that there are very few people who are equipped to help other so I was thinking about this and how maybe it is even important to have less of a stigma around all of mental health because this is part of the problem as well.
Leave a Reply