Shifting Talk About Food and Movement is Suicide Prevention
I have spent many years working in teen suicide prevention, facilitating trainings with the purpose of building community, expanding resourcing, and challenging the stigma surrounding conversations around mental health. I have been honored to be in spaces with brilliant teens and incredible adult advocates who have brought so much wisdom, vulnerability, and courage to these conversations. While this has made a profound impact on me and so many others, I can’t help but notice a recurring theme. When we open the conversation about mental health, diet talk and weight-shaming inevitably enter the chat. This stems from years of conditioning to believe our weight is equivalent to our health and therefore equivalent to our mental health. Not only is this misguided, but it’s incredibly harmful.
Weight stigma negatively impacts both psychological and physical health and is a risk factor for depression, disordered eating, and disordered exercise. When we look at this as a risk factor for suicide, we see that individuals with Anorexia Nervosa are 31 times more likely to make a fatal suicide attempt than the general population, individuals with Bulimia Nervosa are nearly 8 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and approximately 15% of adolescents with Binge Eating Disorder have attempted suicide. The death rate by suicide among people with eating disorders is higher than any other mental illness, including depression and schizophrenia. So why aren’t we taking this seriously?
Using weight as a false indicator of health is by design. In a culture where purity politics are rising and eugenics are casually on display in American Eagle ads, our society’s idolization of thinness is purposefully being perpetuated as a means of control. It’s harder to resist when your brain is occupied by weight loss. It’s harder to strategize, when your brain doesn’t have the nutrients needed to think clearly. And so, we find ourselves in a repeated cycle of associating health to weight, and weight to mental wellness. When this is the narrative being sold, it’s unsurprising that I find myself in classrooms where a well-meaning adult mentions the power of “working out” or “eating right” as a way to tend to our mental wellness. But even though these comments may come from the best of intentions, the harm is undeniable.
If we are going to take teen suicide prevention seriously, and we should, we cannot do this without challenging our society’s current understanding of health and wellness and it’s attachment, or lack there of, to weight.
So, what can we do about it on a school level? It’s important that we intentionally create school environments where all students of all body sizes feel safe and welcome. We can do this by promoting wellness habits, not weight; incorporating eating disorder education in health classes; and making sure students have access to support from school counselors, psychologists, and/or school-based health centers without fear of weight stigma. In addition, it's critical that we also work to make very intentional shifts in our language around health and wellness.
What this looks like:
Ensuring nutrition education uses sensitive, non-stigmatizing language
Avoiding weight-based commentary
Avoiding glorification of diet and exercise
Avoiding binary comments around "good" or "bad" food, or "healthy" or "unhealthy" food
Shifting from "exercise" to "movement that feels good"
Shifting from "diet" to "fueling our body"
Broadening our concept of health to include all of the many things we do to take care of ourselves mentally and physically (brushing our teeth, going for a hike, taking our meds, drinking water, calling a friend, playing a game, wearing a seatbelt, etc.)
Helping to educate our colleagues and peers so they are invited to make these intentional shifts as well
In making these changes, we have the opportunity to decrease the perpetuation of weight stigma and diet culture, knowing they directly impact a young person's likelihood of developing an eating disorder, putting them at significantly higher risk of suicide.
These intentional shifts allow us to create a safer space for young people to have real and impactful conversations about mental health, without the challenges of weight stigma and diet rhetoric clouding the narrative.
Beyond what we can do on a school level, I am also calling in my peers in mental wellness spaces (school counselors, therapists, social workers, suicide prevention advocates, medical personel, etc.) to also make these shifts within your work. Reflect on where you might have first learned this narrative, who your teachers were, what the motivators might have been, and the ways in which you may have got it wrong. Be open to and actively seek opportunities where you can start to peel back the layers of the onion and engage in necessary unlearning. Hold compassion for yourself as you do this work.
Together, we can reduce suicide risk for our young people by creating welcoming spaces and safer discourse about food and movement.
