In the basement of Quincy House F-Entry, next to the rumblings of the washers and dryers of the laundry room, is a door coated in chipped white paint and labeled "Store Room." But taped over the letters is a piece of yellow paper with a handwritten message--"echo."

ECHO's image is a balancing act--though the organization maintains a low profile so as not to intimidate students, it strives to be noticed by people looking for help with eating concerns.

Behind the closed door sit two of the 18 staffers for Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach (ECHO), a group dedicated to raising campus awareness of eating disorders and body image problems. While outreach is an important part of ECHO's image, the office is also a place for people to stop by from 8 to 11 p.m., Sunday through Wednesday. After hours, the hotline forwards the calls to one counselor's personal telephone line.

The staff of ECHO is there for people with eating disorders, for friends of people with eating disorders or people who just need to talk about their food concerns.

"I do feel that it's something that touches us all, not only the people who have a diagnosed eating disorder. It's a spectrum," says one of ECHO's co-directors.

But it takes more than comfy couches and a quiet room to draw visitors to the ECHO office. To make students feel comfortable using the service, ECHO maintains a strict policy of confidentiality. In addition, students who use the service remain anonymous. In order to preserve this anonymity, the ECHO staff asked that their real names not be revealed in this article.

The Harvard Profile

In a college environment characterized by constant stress, eating disorders and body issues can become quite serious, ECHO members say. Harvard students' high expectations for themselves and their achievements often lead them to eating problems, and then ECHO's door.

"It's Harvard. There's a lot of stress here. People are striving to be perfect," one of the co-directors says. Harvard's emphasis on dress-up occasions--formals and cocktail parties abound--also puts on the pressure.

"You have so many opportunities to be judged on how you look. That can cause stress for someone who is not sure of their relationship with their body," she says.

Dr. Sheila M. Reindl, one of ECHO's two supervisors in the Bureau of Study Counsel, says statistical proof substantiates these hypotheses about Harvard's environment.

"People with eating disorders tend to be very driven, perfectionists, competitive and other-oriented," Reindl says. "Harvard tends to select for people who are going to be all of those. It's a very stressful environment. People turn to eating disorders to cope...It exacerbates any previous tendency to an eating disorder."

Reindl's conclusions come from both her interactions with students and a survey conducted by a member of the psychology department in 1991. The research showed that 24 percent of women and 4 percent of men said they had used starvation or fasting as a method of weight control sometime during college.

Binge eating is also a concern, with 25 percent of women acknowledging binge behavior.

But Harvard has food and weight problems beyond common forms of anorexia and bulimia.