Moorpark College continues to celebrate the Year of Wellness with the lecture “The Reality of Eating Disorders,” given by Rachel Sherwyn on March 3.
Sherwyn, the program director of the Westlake Outpatient Eating Disorder program at La Ventana Treatment Center, aims to use her knowledge and experience to help with those suffering from eating disorders and to spread awareness and hope to all Moorpark students.
“I would like the students to be armed with facts so that they will feel empowered to help themselves, if they are suffering with an eating disorder,” Sherwyn said.
Eating disorders are a prevalent problem on college campuses, so Health Education Instructor Lisa Noack invited Sherwyn to speak about this issue.
“It’s really important to increase the awareness and education about eating disorders,” Noack said. “They are really common on college campuses because they tend to present themselves in times of stress and transition, which is what it’s all about.”
In the lecture, Sherwyn will touch on the signs and symptoms of eating disorders. She will also focus primarily on the disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating. She will also talk in-depth about the shame and stigma around these mental illnesses as well as what can be done to begin healing from them.
Sherwyn aims for the lecture to be interactive, encouraging audience participation and planning to do a question-and-answer segment.
One important thing Sherwyn hopes to convey to students during her lecture is the true nature of eating disorders. There is a lot of misleading information about them in the media and online, so she believes it is crucial to teach them what sufferers of eating disorders go through.
“I would like students to know that people with eating disorders do not ‘choose’ to have them,” Sherwyn said. “Eating disorders often begin as effective coping mechanisms to seemingly overwhelming psychosocial stressors and then become maladaptive ways to cope over time. I want the students to understand the pain of having an eating disorder so that they do not think it’s about something so simple as vanity.”
One of Noack’s primary goals when she invited Sherwyn to lecture was to help decreasing the stigma of mental illnesses such as these eating disorders.
“The most important thing is to decrease the shame involved,” Noack said. “Unfortunately, there’s still such a stigma in our society about mental illnesses and it keeps people from getting help that could really be useful. People think mental illness is what’s portrayed in the media, when in reality, people are walking around functioning just fine with some level of mental illness.”
The lecture will begin at 1 p.m. on Thursday, March 3 in PS 202.
Noack encourages any student who is suffering from any mental illness to get help from the Health Center on campus or from any doctor or mental health practitioner in the area.
“Don’t just try to power through it,” Noack said. “There’s a lot that can be done.”
