Absolutely. I think that this is a committee that's being commissioned to talk about women and girls. Eating disorders do affect boys as well, but while we're talking about women and girls, it's been understood that this is an illness of affluent, vain girls, and to understand that it is a severe mental illness is one issue.
I'll tell you a story about one of my clients. She was having chest pain, and I was very nervous for her, and I accompanied her to emergency. I did that because I knew that she was going to be treated terribly in the emergency department. When I mentioned to the ER doctor that she had been a client of mine at SickKids and that she had been struggling with an eating disorder for many years, he said to tell her the waiting list was six months long, and then proceeded to not really treat her with the same kind of respect or care that you would get if you were just having chest pain and someone didn't know that you had an eating disorder.
So I think our clients are discriminated against on the understanding that this is something that people do to themselves, that it's a bad choice that they make, whereas what we're trying to educate the committee and the public about is that this is a mental illness that is very based in genetic and biological functions.