To commemorate Eating Disorder Awareness Week, several events were slated to occur in the student center, including tabling by the office of student involvement, a Wellness Wednesday focusing on eating disorder awareness and a presentation in the Mabel Brown Room which was cancelled due to lack of attendance.
Awareness about the reality of eating disorders on college campuses is important, as they affect college students more than any other group of people and claim more lives than any other mental illness, according to The World Psychiatric Association. However, I believe that Keene State College is severely lacking in resources for students with eating disorders, rendering words like “awareness” and “self-love” entirely useless.
For starters, KSC no longer has a dedicated on-campus dietitian. Dietitians are necessary on any campus to sustain the overall health of the student population, and there are a litany of reasons why the services of a dietitian may be required beyond disordered eating.
Diabetic students, especially those who have been recently diagnosed and/or who have never lived away from home before, need to work with a dietitian to avoid medical emergencies on campus. Similarly, people with dietary restrictions such as severe food allergies rely on dietitians to ensure the food options available on campus allow their nutritional needs to be met.
Being properly treated for an eating disorder means meeting with a dietitian weekly. The on-campus dietitians at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and the University of Vermont (UVM) are both knowledgeable about eating disorders and can work with students in tandem with the schools’ medical offices. In contrast, KSC does not have a full-time dedicated dietitian at all. This is a massive disservice to anyone who needs to be put on a meal plan, regardless of the reason.
Beyond this, the resources we do have on campus fall short. In order to properly treat an eating disorder, there needs to be coordination of care between a patient’s psychiatrist, dietitian and primary care provider (PCP). Eating disorders are ego-syntonic, meaning that they appear to align with the goals of the patient’s ego and self-image. This means that even if someone is actively seeking help for an eating disorder, they need to be medically monitored and put on a meal plan to ensure they are not getting worse under the care of any one provider. For example, someone with an eating disorder might tell their psychiatrist that they think they have been overeating, but if their PCP finds that they are rapidly losing weight their psychiatrist will need to know so they can request specific bloodwork to be done. Likewise, their PCP will want to know that the patient is struggling with an eating disorder so that they can rule out other health problems. Eating disorders can get rapidly worse over the course of a few months and can impact every organ system in the body, so it is necessary for eating disorder patients to be medically monitored through their primary care provider. Many students, myself included, go to school a distance away from where they live and see their PCPs for check-ups over holiday breaks. If a psychiatrist determines that their patient requires weekly blood work, the wellness center should be able to stand in for a PCP while students are at school.
For many schools, including UNH and UVM, this is the standard. In contrast, the KSC Wellness Center has a limited staff of nurse practitioners that is unequipped for sufficient medical monitoring, and communication between the wellness center and external providers can take several weeks. The impetus is entirely on the student to be a go-between for their own treatment, which they may not even feel is needed. Multiple times I have gone to the wellness center for bloodwork I had scheduled for that day and was told that they forgot to order the labs and to come back the following week, only to find out they were not the labs my provider had requested because they had never coordinated care. I got the impression that the nurses are frustrated and overwhelmed, which is not their fault; limited funds leading to understaffing in the wake of the pandemic has deeply affected every program on campus.
However, it is important that students with eating disorders feel that they deserve to be helped. KSC must reckon with the fact that eating disorders are a medical issue, and spreading awareness only goes so far if it is a struggle for students to get help. This issue, among many others, is emblematic of a larger problem at the college, which is that more funds need to be allocated toward dining and medical services. It is easy for students to fall through the cracks and become severely ill while they are at school, but measures can be taken to get these students back on track sooner rather than later. Eating Disorder Awareness Week would mean a lot more to those suffering if Keene State were to step up and meet their needs.
Alonzo Smith can be contacted at
alsmith@kscequinox.com
