Paul Campos: A little-known fact about Terri Schiavo

Terri Schiavo is being starved to death because she was once a chubby
little girl.

By PAUL CAMPOS,
March 23, 2005

As I write these words, Terri Schiavo is being starved to death because
she was once a chubby little girl.

Almost everyone has heard about how, 15 years ago, Schiavo's heart
stopped for several minutes, causing massive brain damage that left her
severely disabled.

What very few people are aware of, because it has gone largely
unreported, is that Terri's heart stopped as a consequence of an eating
disorder.

Terri was a chubby child, in a culture that tells children, and
especially girls, that not being thin is both a disease and moral
failing. And our children get the message: fully half of all
9-to-11-year-old girls either are or have been on a diet.

Terri was one of these children. She spent much of her childhood and
adolescence dieting, in a desperate effort to deal with having the
"wrong" kind of body. Like most dieters, her weight fluctuated a great
deal, but she was unable to remain thin.

Eventually, according to evidence introduced at the trial following her
collapse, she started forcing herself to vomit after meals. This,
combined with a regimen of 15 glasses of iced tea per day, made her
thin and "beautiful." (More than 200 articles have commented on Terri's
beauty. Almost none of these mention her eating disorder).

On the night she collapsed Terri had just eaten dinner. She went into
the bathroom and forced herself to vomit. Apparently, the chemical
imbalance brought on by her bulimia stopped her heart.

Approximately 10 million Americans, 90 percent of them girls and women,
suffer from eating disorders. Anorexia nervosa, the best-known eating
disorder, has the highest fatality rate of any mental illness.
Somewhere between 5 percent and 25 percent of anorexics die from their
illness.

The fatality rate from other eating disorders is hard to determine, in
part because they so often go undiagnosed. Indeed the civil judgment
that has paid for Terri's medical care was based on the failure of her
doctors to diagnose her bulimia, despite what should have been obvious
symptoms.

Such diagnostic failures are caused by the same factors that have led
the media to largely ignore this tragic irony at the center of Terri's
story. After all, Terri was merely being a "good girl." She was fat,
and she made herself thin - a transformation for which she surely
received endless praise.

The day before Terri's feeding tube was disconnected, an article
appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, claiming that, if
there were only some way to convince all fat Americans to become thin,
life expectancy would be improved by four to nine months (that's right
- months).

Among the article's many absurdities, one in particular, given the
circumstances of the Schiavo tragedy, deserves comment: the authors
don't bother to specify how this life-enhancing weight loss is supposed
to take place.

There is little doubt that increasing the prevalence of anorexia and
bulimia would help reduce the number of fat people in America, both by
making them thinner, and by killing a significant percentage of them.
Of course those who advocate continuing to shame little girls about
their bodies, as Terri Schiavo was shamed, are outraged when it's
suggested that what their obsession with thinness will actually produce
is yet more eating disordered behavior.

Such people, naturally, believe they're "helping" our "overweight"
children. And how do these experts know a child is "overweight?"
Answer: if she's in the top 15 percent of body mass for children her
age. The insanity of such a definition - one that ensures exactly 15
percent of our children will always be labeled "overweight" - is part
of the same madness that is killing Terri Schiavo.

Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.

In article . com>,
TomKan > wrote:

> Paul Campos: A little-known fact about Terri Schiavo
>
> Terri Schiavo is being starved to death because she was once a chubby
> little girl.
>

The fact is Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state because
she was once a chubby little girl. Or as a consequence of chubbiness.
"Being starved to death" is an opinion.

....and I wonder what influence there was for this behavior, Michael Schavio?


"TomKan" > wrote in message oups.com>...
> Paul Campos: A little-known fact about Terri Schiavo
>
> Terri Schiavo is being starved to death because she was once a chubby
> little girl.
>
> By PAUL CAMPOS,
> March 23, 2005
>
> As I write these words, Terri Schiavo is being starved to death because
> she was once a chubby little girl.
>
> Almost everyone has heard about how, 15 years ago, Schiavo's heart
> stopped for several minutes, causing massive brain damage that left her
> severely disabled.
>
> What very few people are aware of, because it has gone largely
> unreported, is that Terri's heart stopped as a consequence of an eating
> disorder.
>
> Terri was a chubby child, in a culture that tells children, and
> especially girls, that not being thin is both a disease and moral
> failing. And our children get the message: fully half of all
> 9-to-11-year-old girls either are or have been on a diet.
>
> Terri was one of these children. She spent much of her childhood and
> adolescence dieting, in a desperate effort to deal with having the
> "wrong" kind of body. Like most dieters, her weight fluctuated a great
> deal, but she was unable to remain thin.
>
> Eventually, according to evidence introduced at the trial following her
> collapse, she started forcing herself to vomit after meals. This,
> combined with a regimen of 15 glasses of iced tea per day, made her
> thin and "beautiful." (More than 200 articles have commented on Terri's
> beauty. Almost none of these mention her eating disorder).
>
> On the night she collapsed Terri had just eaten dinner. She went into
> the bathroom and forced herself to vomit. Apparently, the chemical
> imbalance brought on by her bulimia stopped her heart.
>
> Approximately 10 million Americans, 90 percent of them girls and women,
> suffer from eating disorders. Anorexia nervosa, the best-known eating
> disorder, has the highest fatality rate of any mental illness.
> Somewhere between 5 percent and 25 percent of anorexics die from their
> illness.
>
> The fatality rate from other eating disorders is hard to determine, in
> part because they so often go undiagnosed. Indeed the civil judgment
> that has paid for Terri's medical care was based on the failure of her
> doctors to diagnose her bulimia, despite what should have been obvious
> symptoms.
>
> Such diagnostic failures are caused by the same factors that have led
> the media to largely ignore this tragic irony at the center of Terri's
> story. After all, Terri was merely being a "good girl." She was fat,
> and she made herself thin - a transformation for which she surely
> received endless praise.
>
> The day before Terri's feeding tube was disconnected, an article
> appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, claiming that, if
> there were only some way to convince all fat Americans to become thin,
> life expectancy would be improved by four to nine months (that's right
> - months).
>
> Among the article's many absurdities, one in particular, given the
> circumstances of the Schiavo tragedy, deserves comment: the authors
> don't bother to specify how this life-enhancing weight loss is supposed
> to take place.
>
> There is little doubt that increasing the prevalence of anorexia and
> bulimia would help reduce the number of fat people in America, both by
> making them thinner, and by killing a significant percentage of them.
> Of course those who advocate continuing to shame little girls about
> their bodies, as Terri Schiavo was shamed, are outraged when it's
> suggested that what their obsession with thinness will actually produce
> is yet more eating disordered behavior.
>
> Such people, naturally, believe they're "helping" our "overweight"
> children. And how do these experts know a child is "overweight?"
> Answer: if she's in the top 15 percent of body mass for children her
> age. The insanity of such a definition - one that ensures exactly 15
> percent of our children will always be labeled "overweight" - is part
> of the same madness that is killing Terri Schiavo.
>
> Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado.

I gathered from the article that she was on diets and such a long time
before she met Michael.

This happened before Schavio was in the picture. So her parents,
siblings? Who Knows, maybe u and I by putting up with the image of
American women as thin is pretty and fat is ugly? Who Knows. Don't
blame anyone without definative proof.

Daniel VP wrote:

<juggled and snipped something about bulemia>

> ...and I wonder what influence there was for this behavior, Michael
Schavio?

Don't blame him.

Anorexic and bulemic mindset and behaviors are established in childhood,
manifesting themselves first in adolescence and continuing throughout the
remainder of the person's lifetime (even after "recovery"). Compulsive
behavior will continue in the face of all opposition, which is why it is
often practiced in secrecy (or at least what the sufferer believes is
secrecy) and why sufferers lives are comprised of lies and denial.

In order to live with the sufferer and cope with this behavior, family
members and others close to the sufferer frequently adopt the same coping
strategies, ie. lies and denial, until they can't hide the problem anymore.

Terri's parents and siblings show tremendous denial of the root of her
condition, the damage it's done and its ultimate unavoidable outcome. Her
husband no longer has a need to deny it.