Active Minds hosts Pershall to combat mental illness stigmas
Pershall spoke about her battle with anorexia, bulimia and borderline personality disorder.
Active Minds hosts Pershall to combat mental illness stigmas
By Daniel Mcinerney
Courtesy of www.activeminds.org
For three days, Stacy Pershall suffered from violent seizures that left her body bruised and her tongue so badly bitten and swollen that she was unable to talk. The seizures were the result of a near-fatal drug overdose from an attempted suicide.
On Thursday night, Active Minds, a national student organization dedicated to removing the stigmas associated with mental illnesses, invited Pershall to tell her story during National Eating Disorder Week. Speaking to a full theater in Trabant University Center, Pershall recounted the events that led up to her hospitalization as attendees sat in silence.
Senior psychology majors Lauren Tedeschi and Hillary Porter, the presidents of the university’s Active Minds chapter, spread awareness about mental illnesses throughout campus by hosting speakers and distributing information on campus.
“We try to have these big events to get the student body out there and listening to these personal experiences because that’s what changes people’s minds,” Tedeschi said.
In 2001, after breaking up with her boyfriend, Pershall said she decided to “end it all.” At the time Pershall was a “cam-girl,”—a woman regularly featured on a webcam—broadcasting her entire life on the Internet, including her darkest moment. With a cabinet full of medication to treat her misdiagnosed bipolar disorder, she grabbed her camera and filmed herself as she hit rock bottom.
Pershall said she was determined to kill herself that day.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “I couldn’t take this life that I lived from the time I was a child that I felt was nothing but invalidation and rejection.”
Viewers watched as Pershall swallowed over 100 pills and then collapsed. The camera continued to run as the paramedics broke open her front door to reach Pershall lying on her bathroom floor, nearly dead.
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