Case 1: Lindsey: (0:00) | |
| Narrator: | It’s estimated that over a million people will suffer from an eating disorder in the UK. Those most at risk are between ten and nineteen years of age. This is the story of three young people who have suffered from Anorexia Nervosa, the deadliest of all mental illnesses. |
| Lindsey: | Hiya. I’m Lindsey. I’m here with BEAT to talk to some Year Nine students. |
| Narrator: | Lindsey acts as a young ambassador for BEAT, the eating disorder’s campaigning organization. Constance kept a diary describing her thoughts and fears as she fought her private battle against a disease that almost killed her. And Rob; his unique testimony gives us some insight into the mind of a male anorexic. They don’t want anorexia to remain hidden. They want the facts to be known because if it’s spotted early enough, with the right kind of help this frightening illness can be defeated. |
| Lindsey (to small group): | Ok, Hey guys. I’m Lindsey. I’m nineteen now and I suffered from an eating disorder from the age of fourteen. I’m now just recovered, so I’d say I probably had it for about four years. Quite bad, with a bit of a stint in the hospital. |
| Lindsey(in interview): | A lot girls you know go on diets at the age of about fourteen. And a lot of my friends are doing it as well. Uhm, but because I have uhm you know this predisposition to getting obsessive, I think I became obsessive about the diet, and it spiraled into an illness. My weight loss was quite gradual. Uhm, and it, for that reason it went quite unnoticed. It was my parents that picked it up because they could see that I was limiting my food a lot, and they could see that I, I didn’t see what they see when they would say, ‘Well you’re looking slim’, and I’d say, ‘no I’m not, I need to lose some more weight.’ |
| Lindsey (to Year Nine Learners): | There’s a loads different things that anorexic behaviour can include. Uhm, paranoia, over, over food, who’s preparing your food. What you’re eating. Deception. Uhm, so you lie a lot. You lie to everyone who is looking after you. You lie to your parents. You lie to your friends. Basically you just don’t want to admit that you’ve got a problem because you know that means that someone’s gonna help you, and quite often anorexics don’t want to be helped. |
| Lindsey(in interview): | When I wasn’t eating so much lunch, I think my friends did start to notice and they’d say to me, ‘Oh, is that all you’re having today?’ and I would either pretend that I’d eaten more earlier, or I would just say ‘Oh, yeah, I’m not that hungry.’ And at that stage I thought that was how I felt. I knew that I was a little bit hungry, but I didn’t think, ‘Oh it’s because I’m ill.’ It was only when my illness progressed, and that the school got involved that my parents found out that my friends then started to really confront me about not eating. |
| Prof. Treasure: | It’s very important that responsible adults and friends are alert to the signs of an eating disorder because we know that early intervention is so critical in stopping it becoming really embedded in the individual’s bodied personality. Uh, but, what is difficult and what responsible adults can help with is that the individual themselves doesn’t think there is anything wrong. |
| Lindsey(in interview): | I thought that my parents had some sort of control issue over me. Uhm, and even when they brought up the term ‘anorexia’, uh, and, the doctor brought it up with me, I was still very closed to it because I assumed that anorexia is where the girl is a bag of bones and she’s not eating anything. |
| Prof. Treasure: | The skills of detection are important, and noticing that someone has lost weight, but often they’ll disguise that with sort of baggy jumpers…being very sensitive to the cold. So wanting to sit next to the radiator, not wanting to go out, having blue fingers, a rather blue peaky nose, is a very good uh uh, sign. Uhm, becoming more isolated from others, not being able to join in. But on the other hand, maybe getting ‘A’s in academic work. |
Case 2: Rob: (4:03) | |
| Narrator: | It’s a common myth that only girls suffer from eating disorders. Boys get anorexia, too. In fact, roughly one in ten cases are male, and many more may be going undetected. Rob was fourteen when he developed anorexia. |
| Rob: | When I went up to secondary school, I became quite, quite low, really. I mean, uhm it took a few years but I, I think that I probably became uh very depressed towards the ends of that, with, felt very bad with myself and set very high expectations of myself, you know with drawing and such, and began to be much more introverted than I had ever been before really. |
| Narrator: | Triggers for anorexia in young men can include social pressures, being bullied or abused, and in Rob’s case, coping with bereavement, after the death of a close friend’s parents. |
| Rob: | I think I took on quite a bit of the guilt for that because I had a stable relationship with both parents. And so around this time I started to…stopped treating myself, really.
I would, you know, cut myself off from all social communication really with, with my friends and people at school. Also I began to withdraw almost everything I was eating. I mean I was eating a very small amount, and exercising more. It wasn’t like a conscious decision I made to say, ‘I’m going to starve myself. I’m going to try and lose weight’. I never thought that at all. But it was, I really don’t, I really don’t deserve this. |
| Rob’s Mom: | He couldn’t really, make himself eat something and he’d get quite upset and… …in fact we went up to Yorkshire to stay with my uh, in my brother and family and I think he ate something, a bar of chocolate, and he had to go running into the ‘loo’, uhm, and right, my sister-in-law then said “You know, could, you know, there’s something happening here, really’. |
| Rob: | At the same time I, I had very serious sort of mood swings really. I could go from being absolutely fine to being completely despondent, in, in, in a matter of minutes. |
| Rob’s Mom: | And, and he did cut himself, which I didn’t realize. So he hid all that. So, I think he’d come home, and sort of when I was at work, and feel guilt, and all these terrible things and cut himself. One Sunday when I think things had come to a head, and he was in a terrible state, and he said, ‘Look’, and he showed me, on his arm and his tummy, and he told me that he’d done it over a period of time. And I was just devastated. I couldn’t believe it. That I had not even known that he had done that…the fact that he’d come home and cut himself. |
| Narrator: | Rob’s health, both mental and physical, was deteriorating at an alarming rate. He was in and out of hospital, as the medical profession tried to decide what was wrong and what to do with him. |
| Rob: | I was taken to hospital in, in a completely sort of frenzied, ferruled state in a way. I was just completely desperate. And I think, if at that point, I hadn’t got help, yeah, I probably would have died. |
| Narrator: | Rob was eventually admitted as an in-patient at an adolescent psychiatric unit. Finally he could receive the care and attention he so desperately needed. |
| Rob: | It does consist mainly at, at the beginning and as it happened for quite a long time, of, ‘Right, we’re gonna give you three meals a day, you know snacks, and puddings, you know and you have to eat it, you can’t argue. You can’t you can’t reason with this, you can’t bargain, you’ve just got to do it.’ |
| Sue Kelly: | Once we’ve got them in a situation where they feel that they can start to eat a little bit more, can put on a little weight, then we would explore what other support would be needed, and we’d be liking at some sort of therapeutic intervention…. |
| Rob: | It was really, enlightening actually and also just made incredible changes in how I saw things, really. It, I mean, it was nothing, you know, nothing magical or mystical about it. But simply someone, I had a really good relationship with and just talking to them on a regular basis helped me to work through myself, you know trace back, the how things had, how thoughts and feelings had sort of evolved really, and challenged the assumptions that were feeding them. (8:36) |
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