14 DAY TRIAL // Rachel Farrokh, a 37-year-old actress from Southern Carolina, has been struggling with a severe form of anorexia nervosa for 10 years now. She weighs around 40 pounds (18.1 kg) and her story went viral earlier this month, when her husband Ron Edmondson turned to GoFundMe for financial assistance to get her the medical help she needed.
As she said in the video that has now been seen and shared by millions (the second one embedded below), this was her last chance at getting healthy, her last chance at life. In an update, Rachel thanks all those who donated money for her and, in the process, helped her raise awareness on the dangers of not treating eating disorders in time.
The money has been raised, Rachel will receive treatment at home
Rachel is now bedridden and her husband has quit his job as a personal trainer to be her caregiver around the clock. At the time they decided to go public with the story and ask for donations, she had already been turned away from the clinics in the area where she went asking for treatment, because she had gone under the minimum weight allowed.
In other words, she was a liability because she weighed so little, which made her a patient no one wanted. Rachel and Ron say that there’s only one clinic where she would be received, but they didn’t have the money to make the out-of-state journey and to pay for treatment.
The amount set for the GoFundMe campaign was of $100,000 (€91,668), but they have managed to get almost double the sum, as of the time of writing.
In an update video, Rachel thanks all those who were touched enough by her story as to donate, and tells them that she will be receiving treatment at home in a first stage, until she’s strong enough to be able to travel to the clinic.
She also expresses gratitude at having been able to ring the alarm on the dangers of not treating eating disorders as a mental issue, and thus not getting the appropriate treatment in time.
Eating disorders kill
As Rachel explained in her first video, her anorexia is a mental illness: it’s not so much a simple refusal to eat, but the desire to not do so because of a feeling of unworthiness, of thinking that she is not right and not deserving of life.
Experts agree that eating disorders have to be treated as mental issues and thus have the stigma removed from them, as if they’re something the sufferer brings onto themselves and which can be stopped / cured at any given moment, through a simple exercise of the will.
At the time she went public to ask for donations, Rachel knew there was a chance she might not be able to raise the money in time, since she was in a race against time. Still, she stressed, even if she was sentenced to death, she hoped her story would serve to help others, either sufferers who were refusing help or those around them refusing to acknowledge there was a problem.
Hopefully, she will now be able to do both.
