After visiting a close friend who currently has Anorexia, seeing her inspired me to base this project on eating disorders. In addition, coming from a community in which mental health isn’t common conversation has meant that eating disorders are seen to have easy fixes. ‘Why don’t you just eat’ is a common reaction to the matter and this lack of understanding about the severity of these conditions. I wanted to explore the reasoning behind this lack of understanding and to bring attention and awareness to mental health and eating disorders within the British Asian community.
I wanted to explore the causes of eating disorders and how being within in a certain culture can mean late diagnosis due to a lack understanding about eating disorders and mental health in general. This led me to create a survey. For the survey I wanted to ask people who were part of the Asian community and who lived within Britain so that the data I received had fewer variables. I collated questions and gathered information from people via SurveyMonkey. I wanted to find out how much they knew about Anorexia Nervosa and how they, as a community, dealt with mental health.
I decided to make four zines, each exploring different areas surrounding the issues of Anorexia and mental health in the British Asian community. These zines were made with the intention of being inserted into newspapers and magazines which hold the Asian community as their target market. I also tried to reach as much of the Asian community by including various translations of the main message ‘Start a conversation today’ upon the back page of the zine.
