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The recent death of Polly Ann Williams struck a chord with a lot of people. Even now, months after her suicide, she remains among the top ten search words leading people here to this site and my eulogy to her remains one of the most visited entries since I began the site last January.

Polly, of course, was one of four women featured in Lauren Greenfield’s Emmy-nominated documentary Thin, which follows the womens’ experiences at the Renfrew Center, a residential facility for the treatment of eating disorders. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the film, although I do have the book it is based on, but many people who have seen the documentary have shared here that they really empathized with Polly and felt a connection, even through television. Polly’s life - and even her death - has left a lasting imprint upon many people.

Polly’s sister commented on my eulogy post here, suggesting that though Polly suffered incredibly in the past year of her life, her family is comforted by her show of faith. One of Polly’s sisters, Staley, has continued to update readers of Polly’s old blog. In her post today, Staley shares some Bible verses the Williams’ family has found especially comforting. She writes:

Although our hearts miss her, we find ways to rejoice. She still touches so many people today. For that, we can rejoice. Polly is no longer in pain–for that, we can rejoice. Polly is finally free of the torcher of the ed. and the saddness, for that, we rejoice. Polly shared her life w/ us for 33 year, for that, we rejoice.

Faith can be a potent and powerful force, one with regenerative healing powers for both mind and body. And when I speak of faith, I don’t mean to always imply a god figure, although many do find comfort in God or Allah or Vishnu or Shiva. Faith can take many forms and while some may find solace in religion, others may choose to vest their faith in something more tangible. Personally, I credit Buddhism as one of the strongest forces leading me to recovery from my own eating disorder. Buddhism’s emphasis on self-analysis and introspect, combined with its insistence on the cultivation of the mind and body to be an instrument of goodwill encouraged me to examine what it is I truly believed in, to discover the inner me, and to treat my body as kindly and compassionately and I seek to treat others. I’m not Hindu, but I also found the Bhagavad Gita to be one of the most inspiring and beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I’m also fond of Khalil Gibran, whose writings I also classify as spiritual in nature. I hope Polly’s own faith provided some semblance of reassurance to her as she made her final decisions.

Polly’s family has made available commemorative bracelets in honor of Polly through the Gail R. Schoenbach Foundation for the Recovery and Elimination of Eating Disorders (F.R.E.E.D.) at a cost of $5. The non-profit organization provides financial support for individuals to seek out eating disorder treatment. To order or make a donation, visit here.

Has Polly’s life and death had an impact on you? Or, has your religious or spiritual faith helped you in eating disorder recovery or body size acceptance? Share your thoughts below.

I’m participating in a walk this Saturday to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). The organization is holding more than 200 walks across 69 cities this year to help benefit people with mental illness.  To check for walks in your area, see here.

I was diagnosed with both depression and an eating disorder within the past decade and despite the advances in mental illness awareness, I acutely felt a stigmatization with both. Raising funds to benefit mental illness research is much needed, but NAMI Walks also help to raise awareness about a problem still largely shrouded by shame. As the organization’s website states:

We may not be able to measure it, but we can sense that the tide of public opinion is shifting. Awareness brings compassion; compassion brings an openness to understanding and knowledge. Understanding and knowledge leads to empathy and a sense of community with one another. We are walking down that road, one WALK in one community, one step at a time.

I registered for an account on the website to sign up for the walk and was surprised to find a lot of resources at my disposal. You can customize your own homepage with news and updates on issues in mental health relevant to your interests or by disorder/condition, medication, by state and area, and type of news, like new research or legislative action. It’s a great resource for both researchers and those most intimately touched by mental illness.

How about you?  Do you think mental illness continues to be stigmatized?  Why or why not?  If so, what can we do to help eliminate the shame and bias surrounding it?

Remember Marya Hornbacher’s new memoir of her experiences with bipolar disorder? Now you can read a free excerpt from Madness: A Bipolar Life offered by the British Telegraph. This particular passage seems to pick up where Hornbacher’s eating disorder memoir Wasted leaves off, with Hornbacher in her early 20s and struggling to cope with life outside the warm security blanket of an eating disorder.

In this passage, Hornbacher sets the stage for describing the reality of mania in the same elegiac and beautifully crafted prose which has earned her a coveted place on the bookshelves of most people with eating disorders I know:

It seems to happen overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It happens like you’re flipping a switch. I am having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it’s dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and throwing it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls.

Rage swings into a stuporous sleep, and sleep swings into the awful morning sun. My head slides off the edge of the bed, and my mood plummets from shrieking high to muffled low, my heart beating dully inside my ribs. This old, familiar ache does not feel so much like sadness as it does like death, if death is blunt and heavy and topples into you, knocking you flat.

After years of being misdiagnosed and and misunderstood, Hornbacher is finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 23, one year after starting Wasted. She describes the strange mixture of relief and anguish in finally naming the disorder:

My chest floods with a mixture of horror and relief. The relief comes first: something in me sits up and says, ‘It’s true.’ He’s right, he has to be right. This is it. All the years I’ve felt tossed and spat up by the forces of chaos, all that time I’ve felt as if I am spinning away from the real world, off in my own aimless orbit - all of it, over. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it’s a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild.

If it has a name, if it isn’t merely an utter failure on my part, if it’s a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. And then the horror sets in. It’s hopeless. I’m hopeless. ‘Bipolar disorder’. ‘Manic depression’. I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away.

Hornbacher grapples with both madness and an alcohol addiction through her 30s. With her newfound mental clarity of today, she writes of the toll mental illness and addiction has taken on her life - and why she would do it all over again.

In fact, much is lost to these two years of hospitalisation. I remember very little, because madness erases memory, and so does electroshock… Memory is not all that’s lost to madness. There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future and the choices you’ll have. But there are some things gained. The years that have followed my decision to manage my mental illness have been challenging, sometimes painful, sometimes lovely.

The life I live, even the person I am, is nearly unrecognisable compared with life when madness was in control. But the constant effort to learn to live with it, and live well, has changed the way I see it, and it’s probably changed me. After the years in the hospital, I began to learn how to live the kind of life I want. These days, that life is becoming ever more real. But it took a while.

This Friday I turn 29. It is, as I jokingly tell my family and friends, the last birthday I intend to celebrate. But teetering precariously close to 30 or even turning 30 doesn’t terrify me as much as turning 50 this year seems to send my mother into a series of anxious spasms. I’ve felt old for a long time now, since even my mid-20s. Mental illness does that to a person, the brain is set on fast forward while the horrific trauma of addiction and madness steeps the mind and soul in a fountain of unimaginable experience. But like Hornbacher, I wouldn’t reset the clock and lead a sanitized life even if I could. As I turn 29 and later, enter my 30s, I realize the kind of life I want - and the kind of life I don’t want.

How about you? If you could travel back in time and change your past, would you? Why or why not?

The belief that upward social mobility in the United States can be achieved with mere hard work and determination has existed almost as long as the country itself. America’s Protestant worth ethic has been encapsulated by people like Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of stories involving poor young men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve great success.

Weight-based discrimination is rampant today because of our culturally ingrained stereotypes of fatness and fat people. Fat people, it is assumed, are fat due to “lifestyle choices,” that being a willful overeating of “bad” foods and sedentary lifestyle. So-called obesity-related diseases are viewed to be a drain on our national economy, as they decrease work productivity and increase health care costs. And because of the conflation of fat with overconsumption, those rapacious fat people are also thought to represent a threat to the environment and the security of the nation state itself.

The world collectively sighs as it wonders why fat people won’t just practice dietary restraint, eat healthier foods, exercise and pay scads of money for diet programs, even if such programs have been shown to be largely ineffective. Why, oh why can’t and won’t fat people pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become thin, socially acceptable, and responsible citizens?

Maybe it’s because fatness isn’t always caused by inactivity and a scarfing down of Twinkies. As anyone who has struggled with weight will attest, weight loss and gain aren’t always simple matters of “choice.” Here are some physiological reasons why some people are fat:

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NPR’s Talk of the Nation is currently addressing the issue of mental health services on college campuses in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting (audio available later this evening). They’re continuing the conversation tomorrow on how colleges and others can identify and help those with mental health issues. With estimates placing some 30 - 40 percent of college-aged women suffering from an eating disorder, this is certainly a timely and helpful conversation for readers here.

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If you missed the Diane Rehm show this morning, Marya Hornbacher was on the second hour discussing her new book, Madness: A Bipolar Life. Hornbacher, of course, is the author of the widely acclaimed eating disorder memoir Wasted and later authored a great fiction novel, too.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Hornbacher, who detailed her struggle with bulimia and anorexia in Wasted, now shares the story of her lifelong battle with mental illness, finally diagnosed as rapid cycling type 1 bipolar disorder. Even as a toddler, Hornbacher couldn’t sleep at night and jabbered endlessly, trying to talk her parents into going outside to play in the dark. Other schoolchildren called her crazy. When she was just 10, she discovered alcohol was a good mood stabilizer; by age 14, she was trading sex for pills. In her late teens, her eating disorder landed her in the hospital, followed by another body obsession, cutting. An alcoholic by this point, she was alternating between mania and depression, with frequent hospitalizations. Her doctor explained that not only did the alcohol block her medications, it was up to her to control her mental illness, which would always be with her. This truth didn’t sink in for a long, long time, but when it did, she had a chance for a life outside her local hospital’s psychiatric unit. Hornbacher ends on a cautiously optimistic note—she knows she’ll never lead a normal life, but maybe she could live with the life she does have. Although painfully self-absorbed, Hornbacher will touch a nerve with readers struggling to cope with mental illness.

The show’s website should have an audio clip of the interview available later today.