14 DAY TRIAL // A new reality show premiered on Lifetime, a network targeting especially women. It's called “Starving Secrets” and, despite the somewhat misleading title, it's actually a series about the treatment of eating disorders, the brainchild of former child star / anorexic Tracey Gold.
Basically, each episode presents two cases of women suffering from an eating disorder, after they have agreed to get free treatment on the condition that they allow cameras into their lives.
Tracey acts as one of the counselors, having battled an ED herself almost 20 years ago, when things got to bad she came very close to losing her life to it.
Aside from the fact that the show could be said to exploit someone who's desperate for entertainment, there is also the question of whether it will manage to solve anything by offering so many details about how to hide an ED from the world.
As Crushable puts it, “Starving Secrets” claims to take a look inside the world of ED sufferers because “these things need to be discussed” but, in doing so, it's actually offering other anorexics and bulimics out there new ways to hide their condition from close friends, family, loved ones.
The first episode even shows a bulimic living off food stamps purging, in what is definitely one of the most shocking moments in it.
That part was edited in by producers, counselor Carolyn Costin says, as cited by the aforementioned media outlet, because they wanted something that would add to the shock factor of the show.
“Tracey Gold told [the treatment providers] that she didn’t want to show clients purging, and that she wasn’t going to do that to clients, so a lot of treatment professionals involved in the show are upset at the producers and the network,” Costin is cited as saying.
Of course, there's also the bigger question of how fit it is to document the illness of one in order to get ratings: isn't that going to make matters worse, or does television recovery really work?
Lynn S. Grefe, CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) believes that, at the end of the day, the women on “Starving Secrets” are being exploited and that whatever treatment they get is “wasted treatment.”
“We do not support putting people who are ill on television. I really don't think it's going to be easy for people to be honest in their treatment, their thoughts, their counseling [while on camera],” Grefe says for the Huffington Post.
At the moment, the debate continues to rage on. Lifetime has 6 episodes of “Starving Secrets” planned, with the possibility to order more if ratings are good.
Follow the links in the article for more on the debate and check out Tracey Gold's CNN interview, in which she explains why she wanted to do this show.
