Interview: Haley Hunter Smith on Eating Disorder Recovery & Mental Health

.....This is a hard one to answer. I guess I would say… intimate? Mental health and illness have been part of my internal dialogue since I was 13. Growing up, I was always an anxious kid, and that anxiety ballooned out of control when I entered high school. Throughout that year, I developed a life-threatening eating disorder. The following decade saw me pick up mountain biking, learn to use positive coping mechanisms to manage my anxiety (as opposed to severely controlling and restricting my food, which had been my default response to anxiousness), and generally heal. I’ve had some major bumps, but overall I would say that I was doing well. The last 18 months have been a bit of a struggle for me, though. Even before the pandemic, I was feeling the resurgence of some out-of-control anxiety and then obviously the pandemic made that much worse. Last spring, I stopped sleeping, was experiencing nightly panic attacks, developed these uncontrollable jitters in my legs and feet, experienced a resurgence of my eating disorder. I won’t go into too much detail, but last year was very, very tough. The good thing is that I’ve gone through this before, and I know how to get through it now. So yeah, my relationship with mental health feels intimate, in that I’m very familiar with confronting these aspects of my well-being......   ...more

Bethany`s Notes: An interview with Canada`s Olympic hopeful Haley Hunter Smith and her challenges with mental health. An important read this week!