Status of Women Committee on March 3rd, 2014

[Patricia Lemoine]

I think I knew something was wrong, but as it was mentioned by others, there's so much dialogue as a teen in school and with your friends about appearances and looks that it seemed like we were kind of all obsessed a little bit with our bodies. I did ballet also, not that it's not a great activity, but in my case it probably didn't help. You had to fit and look a certain way.

I think that I knew there was a problem, but I didn't quite know what it was. I just knew that I was always in a place of in-between, of never really being happy with the way I looked. If I would lose weight, then some people would say that I looked too thin, and then if I was a more normal weight, then I would be told, “Well, you have such a pretty face, you should really lose 10 pounds”.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

What age were you, then, when you finally knew that you had it and you tried to get help? Or did someone suggest you get help?

[Patricia Lemoine]

I think while I was suffering gallbladder attacks. I went three times to the emergency room before they actually decided that they should really remove it, because it was threatening my pancreas. That's when I knew there was a serious problem, but I think I was so scared of talking about it with my parents. I lived on my own, so I could pretty much do whatever I wanted. I didn't really want to talk about it either because I was afraid that people would say that I was shallow, that I was superficial. The stigma, I think, was a big problem. But I knew something was wrong; I didn't quite know what it was.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

So you were in your twenties, then?

[Patricia Lemoine]

Yes, early twenties.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

What help did you get, then? You approached someone? You had the gallbladder operation, or you went in for the third time. Did you finally say to someone, maybe not your parents, but maybe someone at the hospital...? Was there an awareness that you could look for some type of treatment, or did you ask yourself what you could do?

[Patricia Lemoine]

I was so distressed while I was recovering from the gallbladder surgery, and I was able to speak to the psychiatric nurse at the hospital but they wouldn't let me see a psychiatrist because they said my case wasn't important enough. I'm sure that's not what they meant, but that was probably not the right thing to say to someone like me at the time. So they agreed to have me see a psychiatric nurse. I think it was for about 12 or 15 sessions I was allowed to see her, so every week.

They had initially put me on Effexor XR, which is to treat anxiety, and my anxiety was really just related to food because I was constantly thinking what I should be eating or not eating. It was constant additions and subtractions in my mind as to what level I should be eating of anything.

I took Effexor for about six months, but I think the physical side effects were so awful I decided I did not want to be on the medication so I stopped. After that I found out I wasn't allowed to have covered sessions, and I would have to go into private care. I did a few, but then it was so expensive it was not affordable.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

You have done a great job. It seems like you did a lot of this on your own almost without support—

[Patricia Lemoine]

Yes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

—so kudos to you.

If you could offer one practice that worked for you during this whole time whatever or whenever it was, what would you say? If you had a best practice that you thought really worked, and maybe for someone else who has to do this on their own it would help, what would you suggest? Or do you have a suggestion?

[Patricia Lemoine]

I would say the people in your life should be people who support you. If you find your friends or some family members are speaking to you about your weight, or about your body, or anything really in your life that is detrimental to your development, then you should really cut them out of your life because you will not get better if your inner voice and your inner dialogue is positive, but the people around you are constantly second-guessing what you're doing.

I would say to get the proper support around you if you can't find professional help.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, and I have one final question for you.

Do you feel there is more awareness now than when you were going through all this?

[Patricia Lemoine]

I think people discuss it more, but I think to be honest with you I find in my experience no one really talks about bulimia, about that kind of eating disorder, because a lot of people find it's really disgusting to make yourself throw up, etc.

I see personally a lot of awareness about anorexia, but especially bulimia, no. I don't think a lot has evolved.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Ms. Stevenson, I have a question for you, and I'm very sorry for the loss of your daughter, Alyssa. Thank you for sharing that.

Just so I'm understanding, it was a 12-year battle, and it also sounds like you didn't get any help from anyone either. It almost seems like you had to do almost everything yourself too up to a certain point.

What kind of help did you get?

[Elaine Stevenson]

Absolutely nothing. Back in 1990 when Alyssa was diagnosed, there were no adolescent eating disorder treatment programs in Manitoba. When I started to become an advocate, that was the first thing we really worked hard to do. We opened the first adolescent day treatment eating disorder program in Manitoba in partnership with the government on May 8, 2001.

I was very happy to work on that. But none of that benefited Alyssa because at the time that opened she was then an adult so we had to go the private therapy route for Alyssa. We had absolutely no choice.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Ms. Beattie.... Do I have one minute or am I done? It's a fast seven minutes. Sorry.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you for your cooperation.

Ms. Ashton, you have seven minutes.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

Thank you very much. I'd like to thank all of the witnesses who joined us today. You gave us some very powerful and very personal testimony, and I really thank you for opening up like that.

We've heard from many people, especially from the clinical perspective, which is obviously extremely important, but there's no question your testimony today will help us tremendously in guiding our work and in sharing experiences others might relate to.

I want to thank Ms. Beattie and Ms. Stevenson for sharing your personal stories but also your advocacy with us.

I'll be directing my questions here to Ms. Lemoine and Ms. Steeves.

Ms. Lemoine, thank you very much for sharing your experience. I believe you're actually perhaps the only person who has self-disclosed having lived with an eating disorder, so that's extremely courageous. Thank you very much for doing that.

I understand you also have a blog where you have talked about some of what you have gone through. I'm wondering what your experience has been in people reaching out to you and asking for help. What are the most common things you're hearing? Do you hear from people as well—you spoke about the financial burden—who are struggling financially to be able to get the care they need? What are they saying? What are you hearing?

[Patricia Lemoine]

I co-authored the surviving eating disorder blog on America's mental health channel, HealthyPlace.com out of Texas, so I do write a biweekly column. Most of the comments that my co-author Jessica and I get are from women who will write to us and ask, “How did you recover? How can you actually get to a place where you feel comfortable living every day and it's not a daily struggle?” So it's mostly that, and mostly women who are starting to recover and they feel triggered. They want to know how to get over that hump, or ways to stop the triggers or to manage them. Very often also what I tell them is that this all seems like it's easy because I'm here today and it worked out, but there was a daily struggle leading up to that point. Also, I have days when I'm not feeling so good.

What we're asked is basically everyday questions in terms of, “Can you actually do it? Can you actually recover and it won't consume your whole life?”

It's mostly encouraging comments. Sometimes we get distressing ones, but mostly it's actually very positive and it helps me to stay recovered, giving peer support.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

That's great to hear. Thank you.

Ms. Steeves, I also want to thank you for the analysis you brought forward today.

We heard again from clinicians and experts in this area and many of them have talked about the bias that people with eating disorders face as a result of the fact that it's largely a feminized experience. You spoke about the patriarchal system that bombards young women with an unachievable body image. I wonder if you could share with the committee how much profit is being made or the size of the corporate interests that make money off young women.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

That's a really good question, actually.

Mrs. Stevenson mentioned the diet industry, and it is a multi-billion dollar industry, and I completely concur that's part of the puzzle.

This is wrapped up, I'd say, in a particular consumer understanding of youth and adolescence, so I think you have to put this in the context of the entertainment industry, put it in the context of the clothing industry or the makeup industry.

Through my lifetime I've seen a real shift. Adolescents were kind of off limits. Certainly, children were off limits for marketers when I was a girl. We've seen that market open up, so I think this is actually quite central to consumerism as a whole. I think this is one of the strategies that is becoming more and more common in the private sector, to collect detailed information about individuals and use that information to shift their social environment and encourage certain kinds of consumption.

I can't put a dollar figure on that. One of the things we'd like to do as a follow-up to the eGirls Project is to look at what's called behavioural advertising, and to get a much better understanding of how these algorithms work and the kinds of interventions that the private sector makes in order to encourage certain kinds of consumption, and that type of thing.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill, MB]

As a follow up—and I know you talked a bit about this in your presentation—I wonder if you could let us know if the federal government can implement policy and regulations that could curtail the media's ability to prey on young girls. I'm thinking in terms of privacy legislation in that area.

[Dr. Valerie Steeves]

I have two recommendations or there are two areas that might be interesting to examine. The first one is in regard to privacy legislation. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, our private sector privacy legislation, has a reasonable purposes section that says that organizations can collect information and use it for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances.

The Privacy Commissioner's office has on occasion implemented a particular interpretation of this section to limit advertising to children. I would suggest that there's a lot of room to examine whether or not the use of this information in this way is appropriate. I would certainly make the argument that reasonable people would see that it was inappropriate because of the cost attached to it.

I think that's one avenue that would really be worth thinking critically about.

The other is consumer practices as a whole, or advertising. Unfair marketing practices are certainly under the purview of the federal government. I understand it's a difficult road to walk, because you are balancing censorship and freedom of speech and all these other kinds of issues. At the same time, children are recognized as a vulnerable population in society and are often given greater protection because of that. Certainly Quebec has limited advertising towards children within the Civil Code system. France has taken the lead in Europe by suggesting that the size of models in media, whether it's magazines, TV, or movies, should be regulated.

So I think there are things we can do to push back against this. It's kind of similar to rape culture to a certain extent. Things are kind of spinning out of control.

I have four daughters and a son. My youngest daughter is 16. She was talking about “thigh gap” and she said that thigh gap is all anyone is talking about in high school now. She's naturally thin and slender and she said people were walking up and saying, if you have thigh gap, “I hate you because you have a thigh gap”. If you don't have thigh gap then you're fat and ugly. Those discussions don't come out of anywhere. I think that's the thing that really strikes me.

Ms. Lemoine was talking about “the voice in my head” and “the bully in my mind”. We've talked about media stereotypes and about triggers. I would suggest that young people as a whole are under incredible pressure because of these kinds of media messages. Girls in particular are vulnerable to it for all sorts of reasons although I agree that some young men are too.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Ms. Steeves.

It's very interesting indeed, but we have to move on to the next questioner.

Mrs. O'Neill Gordon, go ahead, please.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First of all I want to thank all of you for taking time to be with us today. Through our study we certainly have learned and have gained a very interesting awareness of what eating disorders really mean and how there are people out there in our community we need to reach out to and provide with the necessary information that is out there for them.

My first question is for Patricia Lemoine.

First of all I want to thank you for taking the time to share your personal experience and thank you for being here with all of us.

As we were saying, some attitudes of course are changing a bit. As you mentioned, it was great to know that your boss could also see the need for you to be here. Right off the bat, I thought that a few years ago the attitude was probably that you wouldn't have felt like talking about it. So it's nice to see that attitude is out there now.

This has been a very important study and one that we're all learning much from. No doubt attitudes have changed, but, in your experience as advocate, what types of awareness around eating disorders would you say are still needed out there? How would you like to see that created?