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Submissions for the Title: Most Ignorant Comment Ever
Today in the clinic I saw one of our college-aged patients, whom I will call Ellen. Ellen is a lovely girl who recently successfully completed our College-Age Day Treatment program and returned to her studies. Ellen had had a very bad week. On returning to school after treatment she has been challenged by the usual difficulties of navigating college life with an eating disorder, but she has risen to that challenge…..until last week. Last week friends of her family decided to give her some “helpful advice”.
“Write about it in your blog,” Ellen told me. “Write about it so that people understand how devastating ignorant comments can be.”
“You’re OK now,” this friend of her family told Ellen firmly, in the authoritative way some older people use when speaking to young adults “But if you gain one more pound you will be fat! Don’t you dare let them make you gain even one more pound.”
Raised in a traditional family and taught to never speak rudely to older people, Ellen was speechless. The helpful adult then repeated her comment, only louder, and kept repeating it. “I cried all day after that,” Ellen told me. “I kept thinking of you and what you would have said.”
Good grief, what would I have said? What I felt can only be described as homicidal. I was and am intensely proud of Ellen’s reserve of self-respect that allowed her to eventually re-group (after a day spent crying and a wave of resurgent eating disorder thoughts) and gain some perspective on this breathtaking ignorance. At least the person making these comments was just a lay person, not a doctor, therapist or school official. I thought about other ignorant comments I had heard from my patients: about the 12 year old who struggled to recover from severe anorexia nervosa only to return to her private school where she ran into the headmaster on the school grounds, surrounded by her friends. “My God!” he gasped “Have you ever put on the pork! It…ummm….looks good.” I thought about the overweight 15 year old boy who was ashamed to be told by his doctor “better to lose too much weight than be fat forever.”
May I pause to point out that none of our eating disorder patients are ever discharged from our program overweight, let alone fat. And that even when we see a child for other diagnoses who could objectively be described as fat, we never feel that such shaming comments are in any way helpful.
So the only revenge I can think of is to open the floor for submissions to the title “most ignorant comment ever”. Sometimes knowing the worst helps us prepare for it, even to laugh at it. Sometimes.
If you have experienced such comments first hand, or witnessed them, you can share your experience by posting them immediately below this blog entry, in our new Comments feature. Please remember this is a therapeutic space and all comments should reflect this. Comments will be approved before posting.
