zuzu, it is obvious that you don’t understand the issue here: being overweight due to excess fat isn’t healthy. It doesn’t help the mood when you are feeling additional aches and pains, feeling pressure on your heart, and wheezing because you have more mass to carry around.

I guess you missed the part where I said I was overweight. So thanks, but I already know what it feels like.

Gaining 42 pounds in 6 weeks is a bad thing, zuzu.

Did you even read the post? It was three weeks, not 6, and I specifically addressed that:

Three stone is 42 pounds, which indeed is a hell of a lot of weight to put on in three weeks. And remember, one of the potential side effects of the drug prescribed is diabetes. But are the doctors concerned about her health? They are not. It’s all about her looks.

Like I said, if these doctors — the one treating her and the co-author of the article — gave even lip service to concerns about her health, I’d be able to buy that they were concerned about it. And the idea that the staff didn’t notice her eating enough to gain two pounds a day is pretty sketchy. This is a known side effect of the medication. She’s in a hospital, not at home. They had means at their disposal to help control the weight gain.

But no, all they talked about was the corruption of her features.

Men and women who suffer from my disorder say the same thing: we want to be thinner than we’ve become, not anorexic. We take stable over thin for the time being.

And it’s pretty clear that Nia felt fine with that tradeoff; it was her doctors who couldn’t deal with it.

What good is an anti-psychotic if the patient is in poor health or dead? Tell us that.

No, you tell me what good is thinness and beauty if you can’t even get out of bed.

I know because I am bipolar and I gained 60 pounds. I have not stopped taking my meds, but I know that it hard and I resent writers who are dismissive across the board about my and other bipolars’ concerns. We don’t like the weight gain either. Guess why? No, it’s not for looks. It’s because when you gain weight suddenly, it’s bad on your body and you need to buy all new clothes. It is expensive.

Gaining 42 pounds in 6 weeks is a bad thing, zuzu. Your rhetoric does an extreme disservice to your readers. (The doctor, incidentally, was an oaf but there is a point that deserves respect nonetheless. Dr. Maria handled it ably.) Pain does a number on your mood. All of us will rush to the pharmacies to grab a psychotropic which does not make us gain weight as long as it does the other job. Are you going to call us shallow and “beauty-conscious” because we want to slough off our cellulite?

Men and women who suffer from my disorder say the same thing: we want to be thinner than we’ve become, not anorexic. We take stable over thin for the time being.

I’ve caught it before from fat right activists spinning an alternative version of reality, but I will say it again: too much cellulite(read FAT) is a bad thing. Fat is not a feminist issue: it’s reason to be concerned for the patient’s health.

What good is an anti-psychotic if the patient is in poor health or dead? Tell us that.

It also scares me that a male shrink was so obsessed with this girl’s appearance rather than her weight gain for health reasons (IMHO a much more valid reason to be concerned).

…

And here is where I plug (yet another) article from Bitch magazine: there’s a great article in the current issue about media representations of hot, cool, crazy white chicks, and how these representations of mental illness (along with other factors, certainly) have harmed the ability of women of color to recognize and treat their own mentall illness. Because unless you’re gorgeous and slender in your hipster jeans, and white, maybe we’re not so interested in your brand of crazy.

The other thing that I notice is that they mention several times that Nia hadn’t been eating because of her delusions, and once she was medicated, she regained her appetite.

I noticed that too. If she was way underweight to begin, a 42 lb. weight gain might not be so bad. Like an 80 lb. anoriexic gaining 42 lbs. to tip the scales at 122!