Eating Disorders amongst our young people

It was a serious and somber Sunday evening at Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, where 30 people sat and listened to a panel discussion called Eating Disorders Among Our Young People. Rabbi Dovid Goldvasser, a leading author and expert on eating disorders in the Jewish community, led the discussion as part of a joint lecture with the Orthodox Union and the men’s and women’s divisions of Lander College. He said the evening was all about “insight and perspective about eating disorders.”

Rabbi Yale Butler, the director of programming at Lander College, said the event was put together “to inform and assist the community in issues of import” and “to sound the alarm and make people aware” about the prevalence and seriousness of eating disorders in the Jewish world.

Goldvasser, who is also the director of the center for Torah initiatives at Lander’s college for women, is the author of 10 books on eating disorders, including “Starving Souls: A Spiritual Guide To Understanding Eating Disorders.” He said that the “alarming, alarming rate” of eating disorders in the Jewish community is the same rate as it is throughout the rest of the world, and eating disorders have become a plague of “epidemic proportions.” The rates of anorexia, bulimia and other disorders are equally common “in every sect of Judaism”, Goldvasser said.

Goldvasser discussed a large number of very surprising statistics that shed some insight into how serious these illnesses are. He said more than half of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their body images, which spikes to 75 percent at age 18. At least 40 percent of girls between the fourth and sixth grades have tried dieting and that “young girls are more afraid with becoming fat than nuclear war or cancer.”

Other members of the evening’s panel included Dr. Alan Perry, the chairman of the psychology department at Lander College for men, Rabbi Jonathan Morgenstern, the rabbi of the Young Israel of Scarsdale, and Dr. Ditza Berger, a psych professor at Lander’s women’s college who also runs a private practice in Lawrence. The trio spoke about the disorders from both a clinical and a spiritual standpoint and helped answer audience questions after the panel discussion was completed. Several audience members declined to comment for this story citing the very personal and private nature of the reasons they attended this evening panel discussion.

Parents, friends and loved ones are all greatly affected and impacted by someone who has an eating disorder, which is a psychological disease just as much as it is a physical one. “It’s an all consuming nature of illness,” Perry said. “As a clinician, the topic is a very sobering one.”

Goldvasser went so far as to compare anorexia so cutting, or self mutilation, because of the self harm inflicted on the human body and “both are suffering from a great challenge we don’t understand.” He told numerous stories of patients with eating disorders, including an 18-year-old who said “she would rather die than do away with anorexia” and a 12-year-old girl who asked Goldvasser to recite viduy (a prayer of confession before one’s death) with her.

The panel agreed that it’s extremely difficult for parents or a significant other to deal with someone with an eating disorder. “It’s easy for a family to say to an anorexic ‘you look bad’ and that’s music to their ears,” Perry said. “If you look good, then [the anorexic individual says] lose more weight. If you look bad, then that’s great.” The catch-22 in that way is one of the reasons why Perry thinks eating disorders are so very tough on families. “They disrupt and victimize the family,” he said. “It’s torture for them.”

Early identification is extremely important for parents, teachers and counselors, according to Berger, because “the longer the disorder, the harder it is to undo.” Berger has trained numerous staff members at such organizations as NCSY and Camp Sternberg in helping someone with an eating disorder. It’s those “slightly removed peers with more objectivity [that] point it out first.”

Berger’s training deals with what teachers and counselors should do in certain situations and “the psychological issues adolescents face.” Teachers, counselors and parents shouldn’t try treating anyone with a disorder, but “recognize early signs and then draw back and refer,” Berger said.

It doesn’t take just one doctor or specialist to combat and overcome an eating disorder, but “a nutritionist, psychologist and a therapist working together as a team to help the family,” Perry said. Patients with eating disorders who are admitted to hospitals and facilities around the area are given anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs because the mindset of someone with anorexia or bulimia “is so distorted,” Perry said. “The obsessive component to the illness is also devastating.”

A quarter of anorexic cases and 40 percent of binge eaters who are at risk for bulimia are males, Goldvasser said. These male cases are more underreported “because of the shame” involved. Perry said that males put more of an emphasis on exercise rather than purging or using laxatives to stay thin in “more of a macho approach.” Perry called males with eating disorders a relatively new phenomenon and the risks and dangers are just as serious in boys as they are girls.

Rabbi Morgenstern of Scarsdale said that the emphasis society puts on external appearance is a major cause for eating disorders and that people should try to build from within. He called eating disorders “a self destructive addiction” that should be dealt with and controlled before the age of 18, when they could go off to college or Israel. “If we don’t address it, it’ll haunt them for the rest of their lives. As long as you have that ability to address it, do so because it could save a life.”