For National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (February 24th – March 1st) we wanted to highlight an article written by one of our own pharmacy students. Jules Aukerman is a wonderful person, top of her class, and willing to share her own struggle with her eating disorder. This past summer Jules had to be admitted to the ICU because she was hyponatremic and her body could not sustain itself. I interviewed Jules about how she’s been doing since she wrote her own article on the topic and what she does to keep healthy and active.
Please everybody check out her article here! https://www.theodysseyonline.com/eating-disorder-taught-me
If you had to summarize that time in your life for everybody who didn’t click the link above, how would you describe it?
Very lonely. Mental illness can isolate you from others and you end up closing yourself off. Especially with eating disorders, but any mental illness, can start taking over your life. The hardest thing about mental illness is feeling isolated. But really, there are a ton of people just waiting to help you, and you don’t know until you reach out. Once you finally do reach out it’s amazing, but sometimes you don’t realize that until it is too late. It’s easy to go too far and be suffering immensely at the sake of your own health. It’s also important to not just wait for people to reach out to you— actively check on people. I’d rather someone be annoyed that you’re bugging them all the time than let them think they have no support. You don’t want to validate their feelings of loneliness.
What advice would you give yourself back then?
Reach out when you need help. Don’t be afraid to break down. I know everyone says this, but it’s okay to not be okay. It’s also okay to not be perfect. No one cares that you ate that extra piece of candy or didn’t work out that day. Of course, it’s more complex than that, but recognizing that there is a different reality outside of your own mind is crucial. It’s important to tell yourself that this is a product of your imagination. It can be really difficult to make the distinction between your mind’s reality and actual events. I’ve talked to my therapist about how you can accomplish this. It’s like an eclipse. There’s a version of yourself, the true you, and then there is your eating disorder. When you’re stuck in your eating disorder, there is an eclipse happening, so you can’t see yourself. Once you realize that they are separate it becomes easier to differentiate between the two and the eclipse goes away.
What were the best and worse responses you had in relation to sharing your story?
Honestly, the feedback has been incredibly positive. I’ve had some people reach out to me privately and tell me “your honesty helped me be honest with myself about my own issues and I really appreciate that.” That was exactly what I was going for. I wanted people to know they’re not suffering alone and to use my experience to engage in introspection about their own mental health. I think a lot of people suffer from mental illness and do the same thing I was doing. They put up walls and push their problems away until it eventually explodes. It’s hard to be that vulnerable, but when you’re honest with yourself, you can finally be honest with everybody else. I didn’t receive any negative feedback. I initially was afraid that people would think my post was for attention, but really it was only positive feedback, so I’m thankful.
How has opening up about this experience impacted your life? Will this experience have an impact on how you practice pharmacy?
I think it’s given me a new perspective to always consider where people are coming from. Everyone has something that they’re battling whether they choose to acknowledge it mentally or not. If there is a patient that is suffering from a mental disorder, I want to think; how can I help them to reach their potential and overcome their problem? Being transparent about it and proactive is the best way to address the issue. A lot of people are afraid to admit they’re struggling, so making people feel comfortable sharing those thoughts with you is key. That way you can do everything in your power to help them live the best possible life that they can.
How has OSU supported you as a professional student during this difficult time?
I’ve been shocked by the amount of resources they have equipped me with. At the time, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to come back to school or what type of accommodations I’d need. There was no way I was going to gain the 30-40 lbs I needed to in two months before school started. It was really daunting, so when I talked to Dr. McAuley, Meghan Sayers and all these amazing people, they directed me to SLDS, student learning disability services, which helps provide accommodations. A lot of people think it’s only if you break your arm or get sick, and don’t realize you can get accommodations for your mental health. I was grateful to get the deadline and schedule accommodations, since I can only schedule appointments when my providers are available, and I must attend these appointments to keep up with my health. It’s amazing what SLDS can offer for any type of mental illness. You’re not going to achieve your goals of becoming a healthcare professional if you don’t take care of yourself first. I encourage anyone who is struggling to reach out to them for assistance.
When you find yourself feeling anxious and slipping into the mentality of striving for perfection, what helps you overcome those thoughts?
A big thing that has helped me is journaling, which is why I decided to release my article. I’ve done introspective journaling and reflecting on what’s important to me and who I am. Meditation a couple minutes a day is also incredible. It does take dedication and time though, you really have to keep at it. Meditation allows you to sit with yourself and focus on the current moment. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed in pharmacy school with all the deadlines and assignments. If we don’t open our minds to what’s right now, we’re going to miss the best part of the journey. Sometimes in pharmacy school the journey seems tortuous, but in the end I think we’ll find that the relationships we developed and the knowledge we gained were all worth it. Meditating, being honest with myself and leaning on those around me allows me to come back to that mindset when I’m struggling.
You wrote this article back in September. Reading it now, is there any advice you’d want to add for people struggling with their body image?
A big thing I want to get across is that eating disorders are far more prevalent than people realize. We have this diet-obsessed culture. Everyone is focused on all of the fad diets; there’s keto, paleo intermittent fasting and the list goes on. I’m not knocking people who want to change the way they eat, that’s fine. But all the diets that restrict what you can eat and say you need to do this much activity or you can’t eat this— It becomes this obsession. What happens is that people fall into traps of diet culture and people start following restrictive rules that someone else has created for them. People start saying “well I can’t go to this restaurant” or “oh I can’t have this cupcake” or “I didn’t work out enough to eat that”. We are being directed away from intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is listening to your body, being happy and enjoying food. Eating is supposed to be a positive experience. This culture we’ve created is destroying our relationship with food. The concept that food is bad is pervasive, it’s in the shows we watch and on every social media platform. It is hard to detach yourself from that. I’ve talked about this a lot in therapy; with anorexia it’s common to restrict and only eat specific foods, which is exactly how these fad diets work. People on diets are engaging in disordered eating. That’s what I mean when I say that eating disorders are more common than we think. Someone people have a biological predisposition to take their restrictions to the extremes, while others slip under the radar. Their neurobiology is not quite to the point where they take it that far, but it’s still disordered eating. A huge piece of advice is to take that fad diet with a grain of salt—because a lot of them encourage and promote disordered eating. Intuitive eating, listening to natural hunger cues, enjoying food and the social interaction that comes with it is the way to go.
I want to thank Jules for taking the time to talk with me and for sharing her story with everyone that needs some support right now. Being honest about mental health is so very difficult, but it’s also one of the first steps to fighting the stigma surrounding mental illness.
If you want to learn more about intuitive eating, you can click the link here: https://www.intuitiveeating.org/10-principles-of-intuitive-eating/
If anyone is struggling with their eating disorder, we are here to support you! The site below has a helpline you can contact and you can chat with someone online. Please visit this site to get the help you deserve! https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/blog/announcing-national-eating-disorders-awareness-week-2020
Thanks for participating in National Eating Disorder Awareness Week!
Kelly Usakoski