Gok Wan, a television personality in Wales, has delivered a petition to the British government, asking for students to be taught about healthy body image.

"Wan handed over a 45,000 signature petition asking Education Secretary Ed Balls to include the lessons in the curriculum as part of the Personal, Social and Health Education syllabus," the news website WalesOnline reported. "[Wan] was accompanied by 21-year-old Shona Collins who, as part of a Wans Channel 4 show How to Look Good Naked, has been investigating body image among British teenagers."

Collins survey revealed that 70 percent of teenagers have little or no body confidence, the WalesOnline article noted. The U.K. Department for Children, Schools and Families said ministers from the department plan to meet with Wan soon to talk about enhancing current curriculum options.

Labels: body image, schools, united kingdom

Posted By: Aspen/CRC 0 Comments

Writing in the Yale Daily News, student Elizabeth Deutsch expressed concern over the simultaneous prevalence of and silence surrounding eating disorders on the Yale campus, and called for increased openness about these potentially deadly disorders:

Eating disorders are linked to depression and obsessive thinking and behavior that can be stifling to the people who suffer from them; in this way, eating disorders drain life force from our campus, not only preventing us from being the healthy, balanced community we could be, but also keeping us from realizing our collective creative potential. ...

We live together, eat together and engage with each other constantly. The people in our community suffering from anorexia, bulimia or other forms of disordered eating are our friends and roommates, our classmates and colleagues. Yet as a collective community we don't seem to acknowledge the suffers in our midst or wonder why they might be suffering in higher numbers here. ...

Something has to give. Being more open as a community about the problem and having our administration acknowledge that members of its student body are suffering is a start.

Yale is far from the only school with this problem, as eating disorders among high school and college students are prevalent on campuses across the nation.

Labels: schools, students

Posted By: Aspen/CRC 0 Comments