14 DAY TRIAL // Rachel Farrokh from Southern Carolina was once a very energetic and fit budding actress, but you wouldn’t recognize her by looking at the frail, sick woman she is today, weighing in at around 40-something pounds (18.1 kg). She suffers from a severe form of anorexia nervosa and she is dying.
Rachel has been struggling with the disease for 10 long years but it’s just recently that her health deteriorated to such an extent that she’s no longer able to stand or walk on her own, and her organs have started shutting down.
She and her husband Ron Edmondson need your help, so he started a GoFundMe campaign that will hopefully get her the treatment she needs, in time to save her life.
Rachel will die if she doesn’t receive help
The video below was posted to YouTube to serve a double function: get people to donate money to get Rachel the help she needs so badly, and to get people talking about anorexia and raise awareness for the issue.
As she says in her interview with ABC News, anorexia doesn’t boil down to just “have a burger and your problems will be solved.” It’s a mental illness that has very little to do with food and more with a desire to have control over this aspect of one’s life and a profound hatred of the self.
Rachel’s case is all the more sad since she’s now gone under the weight limit for clinics to accept her as patient, as her husband explains in his heartbreaking message on the crowdfunding website linked above.
As of right now, there is only one facility that will risk taking her on as a patient, and they don’t have the resources to get there and have her admitted. Rachel is bedridden in her home and Ron has quit his job and is her primary, around the clock caregiver.
If you wish to learn even more about her sad story, Rachel has also done an interview with NBC News, in which she explains how unspecified trauma from her younger years and the shock of losing her job, together with her desire to lose a few pounds, sent her on a spiral to self-destruction.
Crying, she says she wouldn’t wish this on her worst enemy, because it’s a complete loss of the self: she can’t eat, her brain is no longer functioning as before, her organs are failing and she’s suffered a lifetime in these 10 years.
Eating disorders kill
Eating disorders are classified as mental illnesses but there’s still a stigma associated with them, as if sufferers are bringing them onto themselves by choosing not to get help or to get better. Until the triggers of these disorders are dealt with, there can be no effective treatment, and this is why more research is needed.
Rachel hopes she will be able to raise the money to get treatment, but even if she doesn’t, she will continue to speak on the issue to show the devastating effects of anorexia.
This is how Laura Discipio, the executive director of the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, explains eating disorders for ABC News:
“Something shifts in their brain... and we are just now working on the resources to really get the research to figure that out. Just as you are compelled to go off your diet, they are just compelled to stay on it. Just as you are compelled to eat, they are compelled to restrict. It is a psychiatric, biological illness. It is totally not a choice. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.”
