Juliana Hatfield seeks treatment for her eating disorder

Juliana Hatfield was released today from an eating disorder treatment center, where she went to face down anorexia, according to Stereogum via Hatfield's personal blog. Yesterday, the 41-year-old Boston rocker/author/former Blake Baby wrote an extensive blog post from the treatment center:

"For the most part I have not ever been inclined to escape with drugs and alcohol. In the drugs-and-alcohol sense I am and have always been very straight. My coping mechanism — or one of them; the one that kicked into high gear again most recently — has been restricting food.

...I am having to come to terms with the fact that at age 41, I found myself unraveling. Or, rather, I unraveled. I wasn’t fully conscious of it. Others around me noticed it before I did. A good friend forced me to confront the fact that I was in serious trouble. “You need to get well” were his words.

...They tell me here at the E.D. treatment center that people have been hospitalized for being as low (at my height) as I was when I came here. (I found that kind of alarmist and hard to believe — I was still skeptical and in a little bit of denial, like everyone is when they first come in for treatment for anything anywhere — but it scared me anyway.) In this environment they shorten “eating disorders” — the name of our problem — to “E.D.,” and say it like a man’s name (“Ed”), like he is a bad man; an evil man whom we need to cast out of our lives, our psyches.

Before computers you never would have found me blabbing (blogging [blogging is blabbing]) so openly like this about this. This is me being modern."

Hatfield goes on to describe the experience of being at an E.D. treatment center, which - as you might expect - is fascinating, yet sad. Read the full blog post here.

Previously:
"Baby fights the blues," by James Parker
"Windows: An excerpt from Juliana Hatfield's memoir," by Juliana Hatfield