Who Gets to Heal? Akiera Gilbert on Access and Equity in ED Treatment

Transcript

Ellie Pike:
It's tempting to think of mental health care as neutral, that what works for one person should work for another. Yet consider the stereotypes of who has an eating disorder. A white, young, thin, and affluent female. Research is very clear that this image is not accurate or representative. People of every ethnicity, age, gender, body shape, size and socioeconomic status struggle with eating disorders. So why do we cling to this inaccurate image?

The answer shows a truly fatal flaw in our current healthcare system. Patients who align with the stereotypes are the most likely to have access and resources to pay for treatment. As a result, they have been the focus of decades of research. According to Harvard researchers and the Academy for Eating Disorders, only about 20% of the 30,000,000 Americans suffering from an eating disorder even receive treatment in the first place. The other 24,000,000 cannot access the care they need due to insurmountable financial and insurance barriers, in addition to pervasive systemic oppression and bias. With a problem this big, it's difficult to know where to start. Fortunately, today's guest is one of the brave people striving to fix the system. Meet Akiera Gilbert.

Akiera Gilbert:
Ultimately, I believe healing happens in community. That doesn't mean that somebody has to look like you, be from your community, but that is not a prerequisite. Ultimately, it's building these connections with people who you trust.

Ellie Pike:
Akiera and the Project HEAL Team boldly work to change this failing system and also offer immediate life-saving support in the meantime. Their impact cannot be overstated. I am honored to have her on the show. We'll discuss her own recovery journey and reveal the vital link between understanding social identities and receiving quality care. You're listening to Mental Note Podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Pike.

Well, thank you so much, Akiera, for joining our call, and I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast today. So let's just start with you introducing yourself.

Akiera Gilbert:
My name is Akiera Gilbert and I'm the CEO of Project HEAL. I started off my career working with women and girls who were survivors of sexual violence, and later I went on to work with men predominantly who were incarcerated. And what I found during that time was number one, the big thread was trauma and stress and never having enough resources, but it was also eating disorders because eating disorders are born from a number of factors, but one of them being trauma and being consistent to stress. And so I was in environments where we never had access to the resources that we needed, the resources that we would consider basic to live, not just food, shelter, water, but also respect and community. And ultimately, I got really sick of just rehashing the same issues over and over again. And when I say rehashing the same issues, I mean speaking with folks who are like Akiera. I have tried my best to find resources and to find the support that I need for my eating disorder and nothing works.

I either can't access it or I did and I tried and it wasn't culturally relevant, and I felt like I was both in the position to support. And so that's where Body Reborn came out of. It came out of a need. And then at the end of last year, Body Reborn and Project HEAL joined forces. And so now I'm the CEO of Project HEAL and we provide equitable access to care for people with eating disorders and we provide a pipeline of care starting from free clinical assessments to insurance navigation and treatment, all the way through meal support and community care.

Ellie Pike:
Well, thank you so much for the overview and I'm so excited to dig in a little bit more, not just to your lived experience story, but also the incredible work that Project HEAL does. And I sure know that we have seen quite a few folks receive scholarship funding for treatment through Project HEAL, and it's just life-changing. So digging back into who you are and just some of your background, tell me a little bit about where you grew up and how you grew up?

Akiera Gilbert:
So I grew up in a town called Ossining, New York, and is most known for the major prison there, Sing Sing Prison. I believe that I'm a culmination of all the people that came before me. And so my mom was from Mobile, Alabama and grew up actually in Mobile during the Civil Rights Movement, and then moved to New York, and my father's from Jamaica and moved to the Bronx, before they eventually met and settled in Ossining. And when I was growing up, eating disorders and mental health were not only not a topic of conversation, but they especially were not a topic of conversation for black people and black girls. And I remember the first time that I started struggling with food, it would be years before I would admit or even come to recognize that it was an eating disorder and there was a level of... I don't think shame adequately captures it, but shame, guilt, frustration because as I said, my father's from Jamaica, my mom's from Alabama.

And to know what they went through growing up, to understand what my family went through growing up and to pose myself at that time that wow, I should be resilient. Right? I should be this person who is able to overcome anything, especially my own mental health, and yet still I'm not. Right? I'm not resilient. And so if resilience was at the core of my identity or who I believe myself to be, what does it mean that I can't force myself to eat?

Ellie Pike:
Well, and it sounds extremely lonely too when you're experiencing something in your culture that's not being talked about, and then you feel guilty for being that way or having these behaviors or thinking this way, and then the shame that comes with it. And I think a lot of us know that shame is how we view ourselves like, "I am wrong. Something is wrong with my identity, who I am," which is so deep-seated. So I'm curious how you reconciled that, your personal experience living within your culture?

Akiera Gilbert:
Yeah, and I think that it even extends beyond the black community as well because shame and isolation and guilt and feeling the need to hide is a part of the eating disorder, and I think it was compounded in many ways because of who I viewed myself to be. And my social identities played a key role in how my eating disorder was shaped, but my social identities also played a key role in my healing. My eating disorder was an incredibly challenging time in my life, but I'm also so grateful that I was eventually able to find community that was able to support me through it because I wasn't able to access care for a very long time. And ultimately, I remained sick. There were no providers within 100 miles that accepted our insurance that were able to take me, but both my parents worked full-time jobs, full-time, manual labor jobs.

And so the idea that I would ever go somewhere else or go to residential treatment was not only a foreign concept, but it was also financially inaccessible and culturally inaccessible. And so when I think about what could have gone differently at that time, there are a number of things. I should have had access to care that I didn't have access to that millions, tens of millions of people in this country will not access eating disorder care, and many people will either suffer in silence for years, decades, some people may pass away. And I am incredibly fortunate that I was able to eventually find community that helped me heal even despite not being able to access more traditional models of treatment.

Ellie Pike:
So looking back for you, do you have any compassion on yourself where you're able to say like, "Oh, this is why, or it was actually helping me in that moment even though I was feeling shame about it?"

Akiera Gilbert:
Oh, absolutely. My eating disorder most definitely served a purpose and it was there to ensure my mental survival in many ways because I didn't have enough resources, the appropriate tools at the time in order to make sure that I was grounded in other ways or to make me feel like I had the capability to make it through life. And ultimately, my eating disorder kept me safe in many ways, not just mentally, but also physically. There was a portion of it of, "If I am smaller," for example, because that was a portion of my eating disorder, though that is not the case for everybody. But the thought process of, "If I'm smaller, that means I'm able to be perceived less. If I'm smaller, that may decrease my risk for physical harm." And something that when we talk about eating disorders overall, obviously we are speaking about a broad bucket of mental health conditions when we speak about eating disorders.

One of the challenges is balancing for folks who take the approach of the eating disorder voice being independent from your voice. For some people, that is very helpful. For some people, they find it a little less helpful. But the interesting part about that is how do we heal our eating disorder while also acknowledging that for some people, especially people who are multiple marginalized identities, there is a physical safety aspect to the eating disorder of if I am in a different body or if I am able to be perceived less, then less physical harm will come to me because in this society, my race, my gender, my sexuality is not deemed as acceptable and there are people who want to harm me.

Ellie Pike:
I really appreciate you bringing some of that perspective to light and that is certainly a perspective I've heard from others before too, where their eating disorder started when they were a teenager and if they could just hold off puberty, it kept them safer. Or if they were thinking through their gender identity and what that meant and there was so much unsafety in that thought or experience, the eating disorder actually helped them survive and bought them time really, to be able to process. And so I like what you're saying where it's like, yes, it had a purpose, not that it was serving you well, but it did support you in the pieces that needed support at that time. And so when you talk about healing, I think you've mentioned the word choice before, and I think that that was intentional to me. So can you talk about the decision or the choice to heal?

Akiera Gilbert:
Yeah. There was a portion of time with my eating disorder where I tried to access care and I couldn't, and I just kept getting more and more sick physically and mentally, but ultimately, there was a point that I realized that I did want to survive. And so there was intentionality in, "Okay, what resources am I going to seek or how am I just going to baseline maintain because I want to survive? And ideally, I would like to survive in less pain. It would be nice to have less mental anguish and it would be great to not feel as physically burdened and in pain as I do." And I think that's what allowed me over the years to even continue to try to find resources. And ultimately, I didn't seek out the community that eventually helped me heal. It found me, but it helped nurture me and nurture my soul and helped provide a sense of mental and physical safety that I had never found before.

And so once I was able to baseline meet those needs, my eating disorder, we were able to start to work on some pretty intentional parts of that, in a community with other folks who also weren't able to access care, and/or they were able to access care and it was more harmful for them, unfortunately, because they didn't have care that met their needs.

Ellie Pike:
Let's talk about that a little bit more about what that looks like to meet specific cultural needs so that access to care when it is available can be more helpful. So you talked about how in the black culture, eating disorders weren't talked about, and then you ended up having this experience of an eating disorder and trying to seek out care. And I'd love to know what that conversation or experience was like within your family?

Akiera Gilbert:
There are many different subcultures, and so specifically for me, coming from a home where my mom was from the American South. During that very particular period of time, coming from a home where my dad was an immigrant from a predominantly black country, there was a level of unintentional dismissiveness because A, my mom had struggled with her own relationship with food in her body for a very, very long time that I wasn't aware of at that point in time, but something that would become more apparent later on in my life. And ultimately, the only thing they knew to do was say, "Number one, this is not happening. Number two, why are you telling us that it is happening? Because that sounds silly. That sounds like something that does not impact black people. That sounds like something that is a result of a lack of resilience." And they didn't utilize that terminology, but it was implied.

And ultimately, at the time, I didn't think that they were saying anything wrong, getting any sort of healthcare in general, but specifically mental healthcare is still an incredible privilege. It shouldn't be, but it is. And so I still have a lot of empathy and grace for them doing what they could and what they knew how to do, even if it was ultimately not what I needed at the time. And so yeah, there was a lot of denial and dismissiveness. It wasn't until actually, other people started to express concern. Other adults in my life, specifically ones who worked at the school or ones who were sports coaches, et cetera, where my parents got fairly frustrated of, "Now these issues are extending outside of the home, and the one thing that we be able to do is protect our child and now it is perceived that we are not able to provide the level of protection that we need," and that's not something that they were able to grasp. And I think there's a capacity issue at play as well.

And coming back to Project HEAL, we provide equitable access to care because we know access to care needs to look different depending on your specific set of circumstances, experience. There is no one-size-fits-all model for eating disorder recovery. And so when I think back to my family who, again, we were describing the same thing, they were just using very different language for it. An eating disorder was not one of those terms. And number two, my parents worked a lot. My mom worked 60, 65 hours a week and my dad worked 80 for the entirety of my life, up until they retired just a short while ago. And when I think of what it means for them to have been able to hold the space for a child who is very sick, who they didn't have the understanding to get what was wrong because most people don't, and the language that we were utilizing was different.

And then to finally be told once they did accept that there was a problem, that there were really no options, that financially, we could not afford any of the options. And even if we could, that would mean one of them being let go from their job.

Ellie Pike:
I really appreciate how you describe that upbringing and you speak about your family with such compassion and understanding, while also holding with the other hand, "I also needed care and I also needed validation about my experience," and yet you understand in the big picture that they were doing their best. And you talked about how eating disorders wasn't one of those terms in the language that you were using. And so I'd love to dive into that to better understand the nuance of language and how it's impactful and how we can actually harm with using the language that people don't really relate to. So I'd love to just hear some of your thoughts on that.

Akiera Gilbert:
Yeah, I always start off with folks who aren't in the eating disorder space or say, "I don't know anybody with eating disorder." When I say the term, "Eating disorder," who immediately pops into your mind? And I'm curious for you, Eleanor, and it may be different because you've worked in this space for a while, but is there an image that pops into your mind?

Ellie Pike:
Absolutely. Even though I've worked in this space for over 15 years, I 100% picture a young, white thin girl. That's exactly what I picture, and if I was to broaden that, I think that there's some affluence with that and a cultural piece where it also gets ignored because it's praised. And so those are the two pieces I go to pretty quickly, and I think it's because that's the message that we continue to receive. Even when I tell people I work in the eating disorder field, everyone assumes it's a woman, first of all. Definitely not guessing that we work with males or trans non-binary individuals or grandparents for that matter. So I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Akiera Gilbert:
And narrative is important and it's not about the stories that are true necessarily. It's about the stories that we tell ourselves. And so when I think about the fact that many people when they hear the term, "Eating disorder," the same exact image pops into their mind. It both, A, is not a surprise or shock to me that many people, especially those marginalized identities, who again, being resilient is almost a core part of the narrative of having that identity right when you are experiencing some large form of systemic oppression or understanding that you do not have power in society or as much power as you should, as much autonomy, agency as you should. It makes all the sense in the world why people may not see themselves reflected in that narrative.

And so when I think back to my family, my community, a language of, "Well, they just have a problem with food. They just struggle with their body image. This is not a terminology that I endorse by any stretch of the imagination. While they just have a weight problem is something that is often oriented around body shape size because we are a very weight-centric society, as opposed to what are the behaviors that are potentially leading to mental distress? Most often, what I hear again is, "Well, I just have a hard time with my body image, or everybody has those weird things with food, they just have a weird food problem." And when I think of what eating disorders first looked like and looked like in conversation for me, it was actually more so around symptoms.

I would hear my family and my friends describe people who I would later come to understand had binge-eating disorder and they would describe like, "Oh, they only eat by themselves. They will lock themselves away. They only eat by themselves," and we'll go into the room later and we'll notice that there was a very large quantity of food or that the idea of a midnight snacker, which is very much a thing, but when you dig a little deeper, that person's version of midnight snacking was actually, again, resembled a bit more of binge-eating disorder or their eating patterns such as, for example, even when we think of restrictive eating disorders or bulimia. Unless you are in the eating disorder space, many people will not consider overexercise to be a part of it. And they're like, "Well, I'm just working out."

And it's always that qualifying word before describing something that resembles the eating disorder, but please don't go around diagnosing people, you all. I beg, but I say all of that to say that as I came into adulthood, I utilized that terminology and my understanding of the different framing that was used to use that as a door to dig a little deeper and understand, "Is my relationship with food, is my relationship with my body causing me mental distress? And if so, how much? And if so, how regularly?" And so all of those things can lead into a larger conversation around eating disorders, the onset of eating disorders, how we can decrease the prevalence and get people earlier access to the treatment that they need to heal.

Ellie Pike:
As you're speaking, I really appreciate the way you're describing this where if you were to say, "Oh, yeah, that sounds like an eating disorder." Someone could easily be like, "Hello, it's not an eating disorder." And not everyone is at that level of realization or can even relate with that language, but if it's like, "Oh, okay, what are your symptoms? Oh, okay, you're eating a lot at night. Oh, okay, it's starting to affect you." You feel guilt over it, right? Whatever the snowball is-

Akiera Gilbert:
It's a preoccupation.

Ellie Pike:
Exactly. And similar experience. Actually, recently I was walking into a city council meeting and there was a long line, so I had to sit outside for a while. And this man came up to me, I don't know, I guess he started to ask what I do. So I explained it and he was above retirement age and just a really kind, older gentleman and he goes, "Wow, I have so much respect for what you do." He said, "It's wild. I wish someone would talk about the fact that sometimes people eat a lot." And I was like, "Yeah. Well, we do talk about that. Yeah, absolutely." And he said, "I can't stop eating at night. I just can't stop eating, and I do a lot to try to also not judge that, and I don't know that that's an eating disorder." And I'm like, "That's a hard experience to have sometimes, and it's also normal to overeat sometimes."

And he goes, "No, no, but I do it every night." He starts to tell me the level of frequency and what he's experiencing, but really, what got to me [inaudible 00:23:22] level of guilt that he was feeling, getting down to the bottom line of his mental space was really preoccupied and he was feeling a lot of anguish around this, and he was feeling really alone because he's in a population that would not necessarily be considered by many folks to be at risk for an eating disorder, which we know is actually not totally true, but it was really helpful. I had all the time in the world because I had to wait for a long time. And I eventually said, "Would you be open to having a resource that would be free to you? Would you like to join a support group?" And he was thrilled and the whole idea was like you didn't have to have a diagnosis to join, to get support.

Akiera Gilbert:
Yeah. For some people, having a diagnosis can be incredibly validating.

Ellie Pike:
And so when you share your story, I see that link between-

Akiera Gilbert:
And for other people-

Ellie Pike:
Feeling like you were starting to understand your mental anguish and you wanted to intentionally [inaudible 00:24:16].

Akiera Gilbert:
Not only isolating, frustrating, but again, not something that they want or are ready for, and they may never be ready for [inaudible 00:24:21] you specifically, unless it is going to, again, get you access to the level of resources that you need at this point in your life. We understand that sometimes a diagnosis is necessary to gain access to that broader swath of resources, and if it's not, that doesn't mean that it's not an eating disorder, but it does mean sometimes that we can take our time with the language that we try to push. I'm a very big believer in not only meeting folks where they're at, but also making sure we frame our language in a way that is accessible to everyone. Because even you, you've been in the field for 15 years. And so if you're saying, "Yeah, even for me, what comes to mind is somebody who fits the stereotype of who has an eating disorder," why do we think that somebody's seeking a diagnosis, especially people who may not fit that stereotype specifically in terms of body size, why they would feel comfortable or seek that?

The second thing I want to note is on the physical anguish. Part of my eating disorder, a large part of it was very sensory in nature. And so one of the most taxing things to me about my eating disorder was not only the physical feelings of anxiety, but also the sensations of always being hyper present and hyper aware of every portion of my body and how it moved shape, size, et cetera. That hyper awareness was the exact thing that I was trying to escape. Right? Though I wouldn't understand it for a significant amount of time later, I didn't want to be perceived. I didn't want to be present in my body. I was very dissociated.

And so to have some of the peak times of physical and mental anguish and my eating disorder, have it be where my body just felt not only so uncomfortable, but there were portions in time where that discomfort translated to pain. And so it was not only these thoughts and tying my eating disorder to my level of moral value as a person, but it was also, "Oh, I have all these physical feelings reinforcing this narrative that I'm not doing something well, or that my level of worth or worthiness of love, care, support, respect is tied to my body and my eating behaviors."

Ellie Pike:
So your healing journey had so much to do with the community that was around you, and it sounds like that was a place where you felt connected and were able to relate and the language that was being used sounds like it was something that you were able to identify with. I would love to dive into that piece a little bit more of what happened internally for you when you were able to find that community and start to get a glimpse of healing?

Akiera Gilbert:
Yeah, it was more specifically, yes about being seen. It was about being seen in that moment for where I was at and all the struggles that I had been through. It was being heard by people who had experienced something similar, and also people who I cared about and who I respected. But most importantly, I think the thing that tipped it into healing was that these were people that again, I had built trust with, cared about, respected, had similar stories to mine. And so I didn't think that the advice that they were giving me or the path that we were walking on together was just lip service from them, that they were focused on healing, that that is what they prioritize, that they said, "Yes, I'm struggling with this thing, and ultimately, I want to feel differently than I do now." And so that orientation toward healing of, "Even if I don't feel great now," and oftentimes, like happiness for example, can feel like such a far off goal.

And of course, now I feel differently, but in terms of experiencing those moments of joy. I might not be able to muster up a moment of joy at that time, but maybe I can muster up feeling slightly better, even feeling slightly better. That feels like a more tangible goal and it feels like something I can do if I have this other person that I see, care about, respect alongside me and that we're walking this path together and that we'll stumble together. And ultimately, I believe healing happens in community. That doesn't mean that somebody has to look like you, be from your community, though it is often helpful. Right? Because our social identities often shape how we move through the world, and so many times people find that they have many lived experiences in common with somebody who shares one or more of their social identities, but that is not a prerequisite. Ultimately, it's building these connections with people who you trust. And that trust can come from many places, one of them being that they've been on a similar journey themselves, and they want to see you and help you feel better as well.

Ellie Pike:
I like that you mentioned trust, and I wanted to dive in a little bit to how your own awareness has shaped the way that you build [inaudible 00:29:28] others, especially those dealing with disordered eating or eating disorders. So what are some ways that you've learned to build trust through those nuanced pieces of language or ways that you talk in conversation so that it doesn't stigmatize or push someone away?

Akiera Gilbert:
Ooh, that's a wonderful question. I know that there are signs to building trust, and there are books out there. I go in and say, "Okay, what do I understand about this person?" And ultimately, sitting in the seat of, "How do they need me to best show up for them in this moment?" I suppose if I were to take another step back and hit at the root of your question of some frameworks that folks could apply, the thing that comes to mind is the spheres of acceptability, and the spheres of acceptability looks like a dartboard essentially. If you think of individuals on that dartboard, your position on the dartboard is informed by all of your social identities and some of those social identities for you and to around circumstance.

So thinking about your socioeconomic status formerly and currently, your level of education, your race, your gender, your sexuality, and thinking about each one of those identities and whether it moves you closer to the center of being accepted, of having power, privilege, et cetera, or if it moves you closer to the margins away from opportunity, away from support success, seeing your identity as the standard.

And so I am a cisgender black woman. I have achieved higher education. I went to a public school that was well-funded. I grew up in a house. And so if I am having this conversation with a friend of mine who is also a black woman and may have similar levels of education, but also, maybe grew up in a household that was multi-generational and currently is married, and so they have combined wealth, all those things change our position on the spheres of acceptability and it's not static. Now, the entire point of the spheres of acceptability is understanding how your identities inform how you not only move through the world, but also how you are likely to respond to that.

When we think about eating disorders, and you mentioned this earlier of sometimes being a way to survive, there's a reason that there's such a high prevalence of eating disorders in communities of color, in transgender and gender non-conforming gender expansive populations. And so I frame all of that because your original question was specifically around how can somebody go in and not just build trust? And I think a part of building trust, even when you're first building a relationship with a person, it's number one, treating them as a person. And number two, just building a relationship with them like you would anybody else. But third is understanding where you potentially sit in those spheres and where they are in those spheres, and how that could potentially impact their ability to trust you, and therefore what you need to be aware of, things they wouldn't feel comfortable saying, things they wouldn't feel comfortable doing in front of you.

Eating disorder providers often think about this when it comes to weight. If they have a patient that they're working with that is in a larger body than they are, what does it mean for building trust when you're trying to heal your eating disorder? What about this person's experience may make it more challenging for them to build this trust with me? And what do I need to say? How do I need to witness them in their experience and validate some parts of their experience while also helping them resource and find healing? Because if we ignore it, then you're definitely not going to build that trust. And I think unfortunately, that is our tendency as a society of if I don't know what to say, I don't want to say anything wrong or I don't want to do anything wrong, and therefore my default is to do nothing.

Ellie Pike:
I really like what you're describing, and I feel like I'm a very visual learner. So what I'm picturing is on the spheres of accountability where say I were to look at it and be like, "Okay, I'm white. I'm cisgender." There's these components that [inaudible 00:33:32] to a privileged area. If I were to identify where I am on all of the spheres, I could put either a brick or a feather in my backpack. And someone else with other identities, say they're trans, say they're in a lower SES status, socioeconomic status, maybe those feel more like bricks. So to sit with my backpack, which might be lighter than someone else's backpack, I think that there's a lot of awareness that I would feel if I saw someone weighed down by it physically, if there was an actual visual representation of a backpack, I would be like, "Oh, my gosh, you must be exhausted carrying this around."

And it would give me so much more of a perspective of, "Just tell me how you're doing with all of this," instead of just meeting with, "Okay, here we are. Here's this problem we need to solve," when there's so much more behind where any of us stand in the world, whether that's privileged [inaudible 00:34:34] or the way that we're perceived or our own experience navigating that. And so I really appreciate what you've brought to that conversation, and I think it will certainly help me just be more aware and to also not avoid that conversation. Right? Because there's nothing worse than not feeling seen and heard to.

Akiera Gilbert:
Yeah, there's a theory where nothing exists until it is perceived by someone else or something. And so to come back to the feathers and bricks, what I always share with people is that having a certain identity isn't the issue, and it's both not the issue, and it's not the thing weighing you down. It is how it is perceived by others, and therefore how you were treated because of it. That is the weight.

Ellie Pike:
And that's what can be traumatizing too.

Akiera Gilbert:
Exactly. There are many people who move through the world and feel similarly about their identities, the identities that they do not choose. And so being able to parse that out from the conversation. Similarly, again, with eating disorders, how we reconstruct food from being good food and bad food, to just being food that serves you in different ways at different times. I now feel very similarly about my identities of I'm very happy and proud to be a black woman, and I also understand that being a black woman, there are more hardships that I have in my life. That's not because I'm a black woman. It is because of how being a black woman is perceived, and therefore the position that I'm forced into under current power structures.

Ellie Pike:
I really can appreciate that perspective of perception and the power of perception and the box that that automatically funnels you through. And so as you talk about your story, you have such a beautiful and powerful story, and I think you probably do know this, that you really are resilient and you have done such [inaudible 00:36:35] to just walk on the path of healing and to develop your own conceptualization of how to help support others, that really has come to life through all of the amazing work that you've done. So I'd love to dive into your desire to make access to care more achievable for folks, something that you did not have when you desperately needed it, and the work that Project HEAL does to make care more accessible.

So anyone here that's listening and are like, "Oh, yeah, that's desperately what I need, or I don't have the insurance to get the care that I need," what are some ways they could access resources through Project HEAL?

Akiera Gilbert:
So first and foremost, they can go to www.theprojectheal.org, and on our website, you can find access to all of our resources, and we provide direct services to people who are seeking access to care. And so for our direct services, when somebody comes to Project HEAL, they can receive a free clinical assessment that is virtual and culturally resonant. They'll receive a diagnosis at the end of that assessment, a potential diagnosis at the end of that assessment, and be referred to further resources depending on how that conversation, how that assessment has gone.

From there, folks are often referred to our insurance navigation vertical. So we have resources again on our website that help you start to unpack your benefits if you do have insurance, and see, number one, does my insurance cover this? Number two, if it doesn't, what might I need to do in order to take next steps and make full use of these benefits?

The third is the program that we're most known for and could not be made possible without our HEALers Circle partners, of which ERC is one of them. So I want to say thank you so much for your contribution to creating Access to care because we have a network of 365 HEALers Circle members. And what that means is you all provide pro bono and sliding scale care to people who come through our pipeline and say, "I need help and I cannot afford it, or I'm experiencing all of these other barriers to care." And so when somebody applies to our treatment placement program, number one, we're able to vet for all of not only the barriers, but also circumstantial factors in their life. So let's say they might have children and they can't go out of state or go very far from their home, but they might need a higher level of care. And so we take all that into account in the application and try to match people with the appropriate level of care and with a treatment center, with an outpatient provider that will be able to meet their needs.

And from there, we also have meal support that we run in partnership with the clinicians' incubator, four times a day, seven days a week, except for Saturday dinner. They want me to say that. And finally, the organization that I started that is now a part of Project HEAL called Body Reborn, we run a community care program for eight weeks. That is two sessions a week that is really focused on building your own healing plan, whether you have a provider or a team of providers, or you're going through this alone, to build that support infrastructure of people who get it and want to see you heal.

Ellie Pike:
Wow, I'm so thrilled to hear all of these amazing resources. So we will certainly link to Project HEAL in our show notes. And for anyone interested, please stay tuned and listen to all of the updates the Project HEAL has coming out in the coming weeks, years, anything on social media as well. So we'll make sure to link to you all. And thank you so much, Akiera. You are a delight to talk to, and I'm so thrilled to have time with you.

Akiera Gilbert:
Of course, Eleanor. I hope you all have a wonderful day. Please take care.

Ellie Pike:
As we wrap up, I challenge you to use your imagination. How do your identities and others' perceptions of those identities influence the way you receive medical care? What would it look like for treatment to meet you in a relevant way? As you think that over, I strongly encourage you to take a look at Project HEAL. If you need help getting access to treatment, they offer free clinical assessments and network of care options, cash assistance, insurance navigation, meal support and community care. If you're a medical provider, they offer ways for you to be part of a better tomorrow through training, partnership, advocacy and research. Find them online at theprojectheal.org.

Thank you for listening to Mental Note Podcast. Our show is brought to you by Eating Recovery Center, an organization I'm happy to say is a proud partner of Project HEAL and a member of their HEALers Circle, providing free treatment to multiple patients every year. If you'd like to talk to a trained therapist to see if in-person or virtual treatment is right for you, please call them at 877-850-7199. If you need a free support group, check out eatingrecovery.com/support-groups.

If you like our show, sign up for our e-newsletter and learn more about the people we interview at mentalnotepodcast.com. We'd also love it if you left us a review on iTunes. It helps others find our podcast. Mental Note is produced and hosted by me, Ellie Pike, edited by Carrie Daniels and directed by Sam Pike. Till next time.

Presented by

Ellie Pike, MA, LPC

Ellie Pike is the director of alumni, family and community outreach at ERC & Pathlight Behavioral Health Centers. Over the years, she creatively combined her passions for clinical work with…

Presented by

Akiera Gilbert

Akiera (she/her) grew up surrounded by adults who had their own unresolved issues with food. When her obsession with food and her body grew stronger, she believed it couldn’t be an eating disorder —…