Alexis Chappell was alone. At 16, after moving across the country, to Paris after her parents' divorce, and back again to the States, the current AU junior found herself in boarding school in Tennessee. It was a foreign place for her, not where she belonged, and certainly not a place where people would understand her...
Chappell was unhappy and out of control. Trapped in isolating depression and unable to reach out, she turned to food as a way to cope. She began restricting calories and dropping weight, and her dysfunctional coping mechanism developed into a full-blown eating disorder.
"Feeling out of control with my life really started my anorexia," Chappell said. "It was something that I could control; it was mine and no one could touch it."
Chappell's anorexia was so severe she was hospitalized for more than a week. Doctors told her she could die if she continued starving herself. Anorexics, by definition, drastically restrict their food intake in order to loose weight, and generally have a distorted body image and little concept of their size, even though they may be drastically underweight.
Eating disorder behaviors are only symptoms of other emotional problems that have nothing to do with food or weight, Chappell said. As she began treatment, she realized how little was known about the underlying causes of eating disorders, or even how to treat them.
"People think, 'well, you're not fat, why don't you just eat.' But for me the restriction of my food was just a symptom of my greater depression; it wasn't about that I thought I shouldn't be above this weight or below that weight," Chappell said. "Food is not the issue, the issue is the fact that I wanted to die. Restricting food was the way I knew how to do it."
Once she was discharged from the hospital, Chappell said she had a hard time readjusting to a healthy diet. The unexpected death of her father just a few days after her release added to the challenge. When she finally returned to school, she began to realize what a problem it was that no one talked about things like eating disorders or depression, or any other mental illness.
"After I was hospitalized, when I came back to school, no one said anything," she said. "It was just kind of, 'Oh, she's back, let's not talk about where she went or what she was doing.' But I think we need to stop glossing over everything, and realize mental illness happens to more people that we think."
Opening Minds
Chappell was absolutely right when she recognized the need for an open, honest dialogue about the realities of mental health, particularly for adolescents and young adults. The typical onset of some mental illnesses is between 18 and 25 years old, according to the Abigail Lipson, director of the AU Counseling Center.
Studies from the National Institute of Mental Health show that many eating disorders develop within that age range, and that as many as 20 percent of people diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder first start displaying symptoms in college.
Even though these problems are prevalent on campus, they aren't widely discussed. Chappell said she thinks there is a certain stigma attached to having a mental illness.
Lipson has noticed the same stigma.
"Overall, mental illness is less stigmatized on campus now than in the past, but still some students consider mental illness a source of shame or a subject for ridicule," Lipson said. "This sort of stigma is one reason why students might needlessly suffer alone in silence rather than connecting to the resources of support and treatment that are readily available for them."
Chappell saw the importance of promoting awareness about these issues at AU. To do this, she stepped founded an AU chapter of a club called Active Minds, a nationwide student network on college campuses that is committed to promoting mental health awareness.
Active Minds is a non-profit organization headquartered in D.C. The AU group is one of 19 affiliated chapters across the country. The first chapter, called Open Minds, was founded by Allison Malmon, a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Malmon's brother committed suicide after suffering for four years from an undiagnosed mental illness called schizoaffective disorder while at Columbia University. Malmon was shocked by the blatant ignorance of mental illnesses like her brother's on campus.
"One of the things that scared me the most was the fact that he had been in school for this long, suffering from this kind of stuff and not telling anybody and nobody approaching him about it," she said. "I remember at the funeral, some of his friends from Columbia came down and they said they sometimes noticed he had gone into a 'funk,' but nobody ever said anything because that's just not something you say to people."
Malmon said she felt compelled to correct this problem. To do this, she wanted to start an organization at her school that could combat stigma and encourage people to talk about these serious problems. She talked to many mental health organizations, but there was no such group that existed.
"No one had ever thought of something like this, but they all seemed to think it was a good idea," she said. "These kinds of things are big issues. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students; I would assume someone would have thought to do something about it."
As a junior in fall 2001, Malmon founded the first chapter. The second chapter was founded a year later at Georgetown, and when Malmon graduated, she moved to D.C. to found the organization as a non-profit, with the idea of creating a network of young adults that would help promote these issues.
Awareness and Acceptance
The program has been widely accepted by university administrations and counseling centers, who see a student-run group of this type as crucial to the mental health of the campus as a whole. Chappell has worked with Lipson in the AU Counseling Center to get this school's chapter started.
"Students can play a unique role in raising mental health awareness on campus - making sure that their fellow students get accurate information, letting students know about the services that are available to them, normalizing mental health issues, encouraging students to care for themselves and one another," Lipson said.
Besides helping student bodies as a whole, the work and the speaking out, that group founders, like Chappell and Malmon, have done with Active Minds has helped them cope with their own issues.
"I used to never talk about it," Chappell said. "I think talking about this now and being in college has really helped understand I wasn't the only one who ever felt like that, I wasn't the only person that moved around a lot, I wasn't the only person whose parents had split up."
Malmon sees Active Minds as a way to honor her brother's life, not just combat and discourage the stigma around the illness that lead to his death.
Lipson said programs dedicated to promoting awareness, like Active Minds, are important and beneficial for all students at AU.
"Raising awareness is crucially important - awareness of what mental illness is and is not, the signs and symptoms of distress, and resources available to help students cope, heal, and recover," Lipson said.
Officers of Active Minds are working with Chappell to put together several events on campus in order to help change misconceptions about mental illness.
"I am in the process of setting up a film series about mental illness and having speakers talk about if this is or isn't an accurate portrayal of this disorder or hospitalization," Chappel said. "I really want to have some speakers, icons from our lives with mental illnesses, so we realize its not just people who are 'locked up,' but it's you, it's me, it's that kid that sits next to you in class."
After graduation, Chappell hopes to go on to law school and get into protecting the legal rights of the mentally ill. Until then she will continue sharing her message and story at AU.
"I talk about it because its part of my life," she said. "It doesn't define me, but it's part of who I am. It's mental illness, not a scarlet letter."
Active Minds is screening "Garden State" Monday, Feb. 28. For time and location, or for more information on getting involved with the club, e-mail alexis.chappell@american.edu.
The WELL Center is sponsoring the Extreme Measures Tour, a body image campaign featureing women who almost died seeking the perfect body. For information contact Kathy Haldeman at (202)885-3276. If you need help with any other issues, contact the AU Counseling Center, (202)885-3500.
