Education and Coverage for Eating Disorders
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know much about where I was going, but that I was sure of. As a sixteen year old girl who has an endless amount of opportunities and dreams for what I wanted to do with my life, I shouldn’t be dragging myself out of bed at 5:30 in the morning for my family to take me to the hospital, yet again, to report the increase in fainting spells, insomnia, and extreme fat and muscle dystrophy. No, this isn’t an extreme cold or some foreign illness. This is life with an eating disorder.
Eating disorders are mental illnesses characterized by malnutrition, not undernutrition, and are life-threatening disorders that impact millions of people of all ethnicities, ages, and economic …show more content…
Although these are the three main types there are also other eating disorders, some of which are not yet in the DSM V, such as orthorexia, and there are also subtypes of the three main disorders, such as anorexia nervosa binge-purge type. These are all very different disorders which result in a variety of symptoms and a variety of body types. Anorexia Nervosa is one of the most common eating disorders, and is characterized by restriction of caloric intake and extreme fear of weight gain. The physical warning signs of anorexia include dehydration, constipation, irregular heart rhythms, low blood pressure, seizure, fainting, weight loss, amenorrhea, lanugo development, and others. As it goes untreated for longer periods of time, more drastic effects such as infertility, organ damage, permanent brain damage, heart failure, and osteoporosis may occur. This illness is extremely dangerous and has a 20% mortality rate, which is the highest rate of any mental …show more content…
These are not illnesses that should be taken lightly and unfortunately they can be very hard to detect. Many people and insurance companies look for weight loss as a key sign of something being wrong, but in reality eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa often cause weight gain, not weight loss, and that doesn’t stop them from having the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. Even though over 23 people die a day as a result of eating disorders, insurance companies still don 't taken them seriously ("Eating Disorders: Facts about Eating Disorders and the Search for Solutions, 2012). “Unless insurance companies receive legislative directive to cover eating disorders adequately, they likely won’t, because they categorize eating disorders as mental illnesses, which disconnects them from the medical consequences, and the root of the problem” (Ramsy). The refusal to cover treatment and cutting off treatment early has resulted in a variety of horror stories of death, coma, and other drastic health problems due to lack of proper medical care. In my first time in a treatment center, I was roommates with a girl named Catherine West who was diagnosed with bulimia nervosa. Her estimate was about three months, but the insurance company stopped paying after about six weeks. Her insurance company, Anthem, believed she
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know much about where I was going, but that I was sure of. As a sixteen year old girl who has an endless amount of opportunities and dreams for what I wanted to do with my life, I shouldn’t be dragging myself out of bed at 5:30 in the morning for my family to take me to the hospital, yet again, to report the increase in fainting spells, insomnia, and extreme fat and muscle dystrophy. No, this isn’t an extreme cold or some foreign illness. This is life with an eating disorder.
Eating disorders are mental illnesses characterized by malnutrition, not undernutrition, and are life-threatening disorders that impact millions of people of all ethnicities, ages, and economic …show more content…
Although these are the three main types there are also other eating disorders, some of which are not yet in the DSM V, such as orthorexia, and there are also subtypes of the three main disorders, such as anorexia nervosa binge-purge type. These are all very different disorders which result in a variety of symptoms and a variety of body types. Anorexia Nervosa is one of the most common eating disorders, and is characterized by restriction of caloric intake and extreme fear of weight gain. The physical warning signs of anorexia include dehydration, constipation, irregular heart rhythms, low blood pressure, seizure, fainting, weight loss, amenorrhea, lanugo development, and others. As it goes untreated for longer periods of time, more drastic effects such as infertility, organ damage, permanent brain damage, heart failure, and osteoporosis may occur. This illness is extremely dangerous and has a 20% mortality rate, which is the highest rate of any mental …show more content…
These are not illnesses that should be taken lightly and unfortunately they can be very hard to detect. Many people and insurance companies look for weight loss as a key sign of something being wrong, but in reality eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa often cause weight gain, not weight loss, and that doesn’t stop them from having the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. Even though over 23 people die a day as a result of eating disorders, insurance companies still don 't taken them seriously ("Eating Disorders: Facts about Eating Disorders and the Search for Solutions, 2012). “Unless insurance companies receive legislative directive to cover eating disorders adequately, they likely won’t, because they categorize eating disorders as mental illnesses, which disconnects them from the medical consequences, and the root of the problem” (Ramsy). The refusal to cover treatment and cutting off treatment early has resulted in a variety of horror stories of death, coma, and other drastic health problems due to lack of proper medical care. In my first time in a treatment center, I was roommates with a girl named Catherine West who was diagnosed with bulimia nervosa. Her estimate was about three months, but the insurance company stopped paying after about six weeks. Her insurance company, Anthem, believed she