Eating Disorder Advocates Rally at Legislature

A dozen eating disorder advocates held a protest and press conference on the steps of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in Victoria, to denounce the absence of progress made with the provincial government in the midst of an invisible crisis claiming the lives of countless patients across the island.

MLA Adam Olsen of the Green Party and Jonathan Morris of the Canadian Mental Health Association joined Vancouver Island Voices for Eating Disorders (VIVED) in calling for more accessible treatment, a patient-centred approach, and the end of prejudice by health care professionals.

VIVED in particular lamented the futility of even asking for answers from the Ministry of Children and Family Development under Mitzi Dean. She’s recently been swapped with Grace Lore, who was invited to attend the event but declined in typical fashion, boding ill for the prospect of renewed dialogue with the Ministry.

This rally was held to conclude Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2024, throughout which I’ve played a minor organising role as a media adviser. Of course there’s little I can disclose about this. Nevertheless, I wish to commend the team for working very hard to make this seemingly modest event happen. In fact, I’d say they worked too hard, with overly ambitious targets and arbitrary deadlines, and thus benefited from having an outsider on the team who’s not emotionally involved just to relieve the tension a little.

During the course of the week I attended a virtual town hall for people with lived experience and advocates. The event was officially closed to the media, so what was said there stays there. It was an enlightening experience to say the least. Prior to those talks, I was under the impression patients didn’t quite know what was going on with them and what exactly they needed from the system. I was wrong, and now join the voices of advocates in calling for individualised treatment plans deferring to patients.

But even before that, the system needs to be accessible. There are no more treatment options on the island; patients have to referred to the mainland—by a physician, at the peak of an acute family doctor shortage. They also send petitioners bouncing between specialities, all insisting patients work on some other aspect of their disorder first (like addiction or depression), and blame away those with complex issues by labelling them as noncompliant. Lack of access and progress thus frustrates many into committing suicide each year.

To add insult to injury, the government recently awarded Telus (indeed, the phone company) a contract to provide eating disorder care—with an app at that, hardly within the reach of the homeless and those with learning disabilities, for example. The decision has since been the object of excoriating media coverage, and Adam Olsen today stated today that conducting intake through an app is the furthest thing from the kind of care patients need. The resulting outrage on the ground was palpable today. Last year, VIVED came pleading and hopeful; this year it performed an acrimonious display of censure.

Today eating disorder patients looked sparse on the steps of the Legislature, with only a rare few out of thousands scattered across the island showing up. Patients’ acute social anxiety and complex disabilities largely prevent or dissuade them from engaging in the kind of activism that would make them visible enough to get political, and thus they keep dying in silence behind closed doors, desperate for the voices they don’t have to be heard by a system that does not listen.