For a generation, the face of an eating disorder was a frightened teenage girl on a made-for-TV screen. "The Best Little Girl in the World". "For the Love of Nancy", with Tracey Gold living out a version of her own real fight. For millions of people, those films were the moment eating disorders entered the culture at all. They saved some lives. But they also froze a myth in place: that this was one kind of person's disease. A thin, upper-class white girl in a hospital bed.
That picture was killing people.
Because the person actually at risk was also the older woman. The gay man. The person of color. The person you'd look at and consider overweight. The guy who lives at the gym, chasing a bigger, leaner body. An eating disorder is a mental health disease, and part of the disease is that it tells your brain to hide it.
So when a clinic with multiple locations around the U.S. came to us to lift their patient intake, I didn't want a campaign. I wanted to break a myth.
That work became led by Eating Recovery Day, a national media moment featuring former patients who looked nothing like the stereotype, clinical experts, and Candace Cameron Bure.
Take Candace. A star of Full House and later Fuller House, beloved by generations, the kind of performer for whom a camera crew and a day of B-roll is second nature. And yet even the thought of revealing this part of her story brought real fear. It took time. It took us connecting separately, privately, building the trust before she felt safe enough to say it out loud, a truth she'd hidden from even her own family, until they caught her in the act. It was bulimia. That was the whole point. If someone that famous, that accomplished, that practiced in front of a lens still struggled to speak it, and still lives with it today even after treatment, then what chance does the person suffering in silence have without us reaching for them first?
But the moment was only the tip of it. For a year beforehand, my colleague Mia Humphreys and I built a network of more than 50 recovery ambassadors, every age, background, and body type. And we didn't just collect their stories, we deployed them.
Together with the in-house marketing team, we placed them as speakers at events, chosen deliberately to reach the people who were struggling but not yet ready to say the words out loud. Not yet ready to accept treatment. The person in the back of the room who came to support a friend and slowly realized they were hearing their own life described from the stage.
We deployed them as TV news guests and writers, too. Bylined blogs on the company’s site, and across third-party and media outlets, so that wherever someone went looking, or wherever they stumbled by accident, a real voice was waiting to meet them.
The goal was always two-fold. Reach the caregivers who were quietly worried about someone they loved. And speak directly to the part of a person that's exhausted from hiding, the part that whispers, "I'm sick and tired of what I'm going through. I want to live a normal life."
Somewhere in all of it, something shifted. A disease that had drifted out of the public conversation came roaring back to the forefront. People started to care again. Families started paying attention. And people who had spent years managing their illness in silence started to imagine putting it down.
The result wasn't just coverage. It was a 54 percent increase in patient intake - literally saving lives.
The myth had never only been cruel. It had been quietly suppressing demand, telling most of the people who were sick that treatment wasn't meant for them. Reaching the people the stereotype had erased is exactly what brought them through the door. That is what happens when social impact and business results stop being a trade-off, and start feeding each other.
That's the higher story. And the hope for recovery is real.
If you or someone you know may be struggling with an eating disorder, contact the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline at (866) 662-1235, Monday through Friday, 9am to 7pm ET.
The Higher Story is a series about looking past the surface to the truth underneath: how that shapes the way we see the world, meet our challenges, and, in marketing and communications, do work that lands with more honesty and impact.
Originally published on LinkedIn.