Vancouver-based charity the Looking Glass Foundation is driving home the reality that eating disorders aren’t something that people can just ‘snap out of’ with a multi-faceted campaign to raise awareness about eating disorders, and reinforce that they’re real diseases that require medical treatment.

The campaign aims to tackle misperceptions – like it’s just a harmless phase that will pass on its own – and to raise money to build BC’s first residential treatment centre.

The campaign’s theme is ‘Not every suicide note looks like a suicide note.’ Print, OOH and TV executions feature too-thin girls obsessing about their weight. For example, one print ad shows a calendar obsessively marked with shockingly low weights for each day of the month.

‘During research, one of the things we kept hearing is that ‘the best anorexic is a dead anorexic,” says Daryl Gardiner, ACD at DDB Vancouver, referring to the scary fact that most people with eating disorders have unattainable goal weights. Gardiner says the creative team was shocked by many of their findings. ‘We wanted to bring that sense of discovery into all of the elements.’

The campaign also includes ambient pieces, like hairbrushes full of hair being left in public washrooms with a note attached that reads, ‘Sufferers from anorexia lose much more than weight.’