By Kristen Maikoo
Photo by Southern Smash
Southern Smash will host its event at Salem today, Tuesday April 5. Attendees will be able to smash scales and participate in other activities to prove that they are worth more than the numbers in their lives. Counseling intern Stephanie Farmer says, “Southern Smash is a national non-profit organization that raises awareness about eating disorders and promotes positive body image through empowering activities highlighted by its signature scale smash event.”
Other activities include “Dare to Love Yourself,” the “BeYOUtiful” photo booth and “Let it Go” balloons, “to which they could attach a piece of paper with their ‘perfect’ number and let it free into the sky,” says Farmer.
Farmer says, “This event challenges students to examine the emphasis they place on those perfect numbers in their lives, whether it be a number on the scale, the size of their jeans, or a GPA, while empowering them to let those numbers go, reminding them that they alone, are enough just as they are.” She appreciates how the event functions to educate about eating disorders on college campuses.
As her project as a counseling intern, Farmer has made it her responsibility to plan, market and execute the event. “Every year, each counseling intern selects an area of mental health or wellness that they are interested in and executes a project around that interest for the larger Salem community. I have a passion for working with individuals struggling with eating disorders and raising awareness about these illnesses, so I decided to bring Southern Smash to campus as my project,” she says.
She contacted Southern Smash founder McCall Dempsey, a friend of hers, to mention that Salem would like to host the event. Farmer as well as the other two Counseling Interns, Amy Grybush and Brittany Glasser along with Carolina House’s Clinical Outreach Director Jenn Burnell will be manning activities and running the event. The event is sponsored by Carolina House, a residential treatment facility in Durham, North Carolina for mental health disorders, including eating disorders.
thesalemite.org 