Episode Details

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Recently I was made aware of something that was happening with the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) helpline. For the past twenty years, NEDA has run a helpline providing support to tens of thousands of people a year via text, chat, and phone. That helpline was recently replaced with an AI-driven chatbot.

Investigating this I learned that it happened around a labor action. As Vice reported, sourcing Abbie Harper’s piece on LaborNotes, a group of four paid helpline staff, including Harper, decided to unionize because “they felt overwhelmed and understaffed.”

Harper explains:“We asked for adequate staffing and ongoing training to keep up with our changing and growing Helpline, and opportunities for promotion to grow within NEDA. We didn’t even ask for more money. When NEDA refused, we filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board and won on March 17. Then, four days after our election results were certified, all four of us were told we were being let go and replaced by a chatbot.”

For their part, NEDA claims that this was a “long-anticipated change” which, if true, means that for a long time NEDA thought it was a good idea to replace six paid staffers, supervisors, and up to 200 volunteers supporting people whose lives and health can be in serious peril, with an AI chatbot. I think that would have been an astonishingly bad idea even if this wasn’t about union-busting.

But it gets worse. Before I get into it, a bit of background. The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) has a long history of either ignoring higher-weight people (as well as others with marginalized identities) or treating us poorly. (NEDA tends to focus their attention on thin, white, cis girls and young women to the exclusion of others.) For a brief time, they brought on Chevese Turner, founder of the Binge Eating Disorder Association, and it looked like they might be turning things around in terms of intersectional work. During this time I was asked to become an official ambassador. Then Chevese was summarily fired without explanation, and I publicly left the organization. Since then, NEDA has faced a significant amount of controversy for their actions around higher-weight people. Recently they were one of the only eating disorders organizations that failed to clearly denounce the disastrous American Academy of Pediatrics Guidelines for higher-weight youth.

I’m writing about this here because NEDA has significant funding (we’ll get to that in a moment) spending, per their 2021 filing, over $800,000 a year on digital and social media support, and they have a tendency to delete or bury criticism, so it’s easy to be unaware of this.

Activist Sharon Maxwell decided to test the bot. Her experiences were chilling to anyone who is knowledgeable about the intersections of weight, health, and eating disorders. I have viewed the screenshots of the chat transcripts. Unfortunately, I cannot publish them here as NEDA’s terms and conditions to use the bot state that “Any unauthorized use of text or images may violate copyright laws, trademark laws, the laws