Frances Chan is thin. At 5′ 2″, and 92 pounds, she is petite and thin. However, the college junior, according to Yale University, probably has an eating disorder.

Last September, Chan went to Yale Health to have a lump in her breast checked out. Fortunately, it was benign, but she got a callback from health officials anyway, who informed her that they had her scheduled to meet with a nutritionist, a mental-health counselor, and required her to come back for weekly check-ins – because they wanted her to start gaining weight.

As Chan writes in an essay for the Huffington Post:

I’ve always been small. I’ve been 5’2” and 90 pounds since high school, but it has never led to any illnesses related to low weight or malnutrition. My mom was the same; my whole family is skinny. We all enjoy Mom’s fabulous cooking, which included Taiwanese beef noodle soup, tricolor pasta, strawberry cheesecake, and cream puffs, none of which make the Weight Watchers shortlist. I just don’t gain weight easily.

Yet the clinicians at Yale Health think there’s more to it. Every week, I try to convince my clinician that I am healthy but skinny. Over the past several months, however, I’ve realized the futility of arguing with her.

And if she didn’t comply, Chan was told that she could face academic suspension via “medical leave.”  So, being a good student who took her education seriously, she gave it a try.  After months of jumping through their hoops, and finally managing to gain two pounds on a carb-heavy diet, Chan was finally told… that it wasn’t enough:

She had finally cracked me. I was Sisyphus the Greek king, forever trapped trying uselessly to push a boulder up a hill. Being forced to meet a standard that I could never meet was stressful and made me resent meals. I broke down sobbing in my dean’s office, in my suitemate’s arms afterwards, and Saturday morning on the phone with my parents. At this rate, I was well on my way to developing an eating disorder before anyone could diagnose the currently nonexistent one.

After writing her essay and speaking out, Yale has been forced to back off and only make Chan come in once a semester to have her weight checked.  But if the feedback received is any indicator, Yale has a habit of singling out students they deem to be “too thin” and subjecting them to this type of clinical bullying, in order to make them fit ONE stat – the body mass index (BMI) table.  Your BMI number can be an indicator of health issues, but it should be taken as a part of your entire health profile.  Apparently, Yale has become so hyper-focused that they’ve forgotten that part.  Their health professionals see a skinny girl in her early 20’s and assume that there MUST be an eating disorder at play.

But let’s play a little game now that I like to call “Reverse It.”  Let’s pretend that Frances Chan went in for an exam, and instead of weighing 92 pounds, she weighed 192 pounds.

Would Yale Health be calling her in, and saying “We are concerned about your weight, and we really want you to start losing some pounds?”

I would be deeply interested to see if there were the same kind of threats of academic suspension for overweight students as there apparently have been for underweight ones.  But it’s not “politically correct” to tell someone that they, individually, are overweight.  Michelle Obama, for example, addresses an entire generation of young people and generalizes about their weight.  But it would never be acceptable to single a person out and say, “Hey, you need to lose some pounds to be healthier, and we’re concerned you have an eating disorder.”

It would probably be called fat-shaming.  Or something like that.  And there are national groups pushing “fat acceptance.”  Can you imagine the hysteria involved if an overweight student came forward with Frances Chan’s story, about being threatened with academic suspension unless she got her weight under control?

Yes, eating disorders are real and terrible.  Frances Chan’s medical profile, on its face, probably deserved a second look.  What it didn’t deserve was the constant hounding and bullying of health officials determined to find a problem where none existed.