My Community Experience: Center for Change

            For my community experience, I interviewed a staff member at the Center for Change in Lindon, Utah. The Center for change is a treatment facility for people with eating disorders. They serve a large group of people through residential treatment for women and outpatient treatment for both men and women. They have three care units – residential adult unit, residential adolescent unit and an inpatient unit. The inpatient care unit is the smallest because these patients need the most attention and intensive care. The adult and adolescent residential units are larger because they don’t need as much attention or as intensive care. They also have units that include just day-patients who can either come the whole day or just part of the day. The Center for Change is staffed with therapist, dieticians, nurses, care technicians, schoolteachers, administrators, and cooks to help rehabilitate these people.

            I interviewed a care technician who works with the patients every day helping them to make it to their group therapy sessions, behave correctly, and calm these patients down when they are having a bad day. She spends a lot of time with these residential girls and has become a good example to them of someone with good eating habits and a positive self-image. She also mentioned how she is often dealing with suicidal patients and she has to make sure the patients eat all of their food and she has to attend them to the bathroom. She also explained how the group therapy sessions help work on these patient’s body image, art skills, eating disorders and how to process difficult circumstances.          

            I was not able to visit the facility because they restrict the people who enter. Some of the patients are being protected from sexual predators or stressful situations that act as a trigger for their eating disorders and suicidal thoughts. However, she described for me the demographics of their patients as predominantly females being mostly 15-18 years old in the adolescent care facility and 18-30 years old in the adult care facility but there are occasionally patients outside of these demographics. Most of their patients are also lower or middle class Caucasians with some Hispanic and African Americans. The Center for Change is the number one treatment facility in the United States for eating disorders and so they often see patients from around the world

            A term that came to mind from our class discussions was the term: hidden disability. I think that depression and eating disorders are most certainly a hidden disability that can affect these people’s ability to live their lives and function normally. In that regard, though, we need to be careful not to discriminate against these people, oppress them, or make them feel like they are less than they truly are. We should make sure we don’t exclude them from the group but instead we need to teach these students interdependence and help them gain strength from each other. I am also reminded again that as a teacher I need to implement structural pedagogy where I help students overcome these difficulties instead of putting them down through use of the deficit pedagogy. I should recognize these students as struggling, but it shouldn’t stop me from enabling them to be the best student they can be.

            This interview was enlightening to say the least. I have never experienced an eating disorder or been in a position where I was liable to cause harm to myself. Luckily, I have a family that loves and supports me but I know this is not the case for everyone! It was sad to talk to the staff member about the things they often experience with these girls and the measures they have to take to keep them safe. It was disturbing to think that these girls didn’t even have bathroom privileges in fear that they would cause themselves harm. And I could never imagine what it would be like to have to teach people how to eat properly. These patients have suppressed their hunger so much that they have actually lost the ability to recognize hunger cues and they have to be retaught what hunger feels like to help these patients obtain the nutrients they need. It saddens me to think that the majority of the girls in this treatment center come from my own race and social class.  
           And I guess that is one of the risks associated with accepting this as a normal, albeit sad trend among young American girls. I have to accept the fact that socioeconomic status, being of privilege or having good loving family doesn’t guarantee you a good or easy life. Another risk that will come with accepting this, is the guilt associated with the fact that society and the perceptions it perpetuates about what is beautiful and normal are only part of what cause these problems. Some people feel so hopeless that taking their life is a serious option to them and I have to accept this as a reality before I can help them but it again creates a feeling of guilt because I do not understand how that would feel. Once I accept this truth it makes me better able to recognize the signs in other people, especially my students. I will also be able to accept them for who they are and love them for that while also offering to help them. I know when I teach in high schools I will encounter girls who have eating disorders and so it was enlightening to talk about the services available to them to know them about myself so I can be a great resource to these students but also to see what I can teach girls and boys to make them less vulnerable to the media’s influence before they could cause themselves harm just to be skinny and “feel” beautiful. Although it is saddening, it was a good experience to learn more about these girls so that I can come to understand them and their situation better as I interact with them as a teacher.