This Thursday at 7 p.m., The Local Show presents a special episode on local trends and issues surrounding the important topic of eating disorders, which affects millions of Americans – women and men. We will also screen excerpts from two public television documentaries on the subject, which will be airing on KCPT immediately following The Local Show and RUCKUS, including Erasing ED(Eating Disorders) at 8:00 pm and Girl Model at 8:30 pm.
This week on The Local Show, we take you inside the hidden world of eating disorders. Later tonight, KCPT brings you a national documentary that chronicles the millions of Americans suffering from anorexia and bulimia. Remarkably, they are conditions that have the highest fatality rate of all psychiatric disorders. Yet, as your about to see, it’s becoming increasing difficult to get a health insurance company to cover its treatment.
You will hear several stories from people suffering from these devastating illnesses in Erasing Eating Disorders, a national public television documentary coming up at 8 p.m. here on KCPT, or immediately following The Local Show if you’re watching the rebroadcast of this program.
Nick Haines sits down with Mary Beth Blackwell, Director of the Eating Disorder Resource Center at Jewish Family Services, and Kori Hintz-Bohn, Executive Director of the Renew Counseling Center, an intensive outpatient program for eating disorders, based in Olathe.
We take you inside a local group home for women learning to overcome their eating disorders. Thalia House in Fairway, Ks. is a six person transitional home designed to fill an unmet need–to help women who have been released from hospital for anorexia and bulimia but are not quite ready to resume their normal lives.
Coming up at 8:30 here on KCPT, POV shows Girl Model which show an unseen side of the modeling industry as talent scouts recruit pre-pubescent girls overseas.
Can we as a society help decrease these startling eating disorder statistics? We are bombarded with messages with what to eat, not eat, what diet to be on, how to look, how to dress from the media. Media messages come from movies, television, magazines, or what brand clothing we wear. Last year at Johnson County Community College, they screened the new film America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments about our country’s obsession with beauty and thinness.
And finally, there are three things not to say to someone with an eating disorder according to the eating recovery center:
1. Why can’t you just eat?
2. Everybody hates their body sometimes
3. Yes, I’ll keep your eating disorder a secret
Eating disorders are the deadliest mental illness. A woman with anorexia nervosa is 5.6 times more likely to die than another woman of her same age. The most frequent causes of death from eating disorders are suicide (32 percent), complications associated with anorexia (19 percent), and cancer (11 percent). The average age of death for an individual with anorexia is only 34 years.
Resources:
National Eating Disorder Hotline at 1-800-931-2237.
Thalia House
Jewish Family Services Eating Disorder Center
NEDA
The first ever Kansas City NEDA Walk will be on Saturday, June 15 from 8-11 a.m. at Berkley Park at the KC Riverfront.
This week on The Local Show, Randy Mason gets a personal tour of the incredible art collection of John “Topper” Johntz. In advance of next week’s airing of 180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School, Nick Haines sits down with Steve Green to get his reaction to the documentary and finds out how he plans to address some of the same problems in the KCMO School District. As part of our Difference Maker series, we go inside Southwest Boulevard Family Health Care where Dr. Sharon Lee has been providing medical services to the area’s poor and uninsured for more than 20 years. Finally this week, we leave you with a sneak peek at next week’s innovation and entrepreneurship conference, BigKC.
Welcome to our first Local Show of the spring. It is always fun to find a story close to home that you’d somehow managed to miss completely. Like this next one about a local attorney and theatre buff named John “Topper” Johntz. Topper and his wife, Linda, have been quietly amassing a world-class art collection which they open up to various visitors from time to time, including us. Randy and Don the Camera Guy Mayberger headed out to Prairie Village to see the amazing art-filled home the couple has occupied since the 1960s.
