By Isle of Wight Observer
This week is Eating Disorders Awareness Week (EDAW) 2024. I’ve spent it sending countless emails and in meetings with health professionals, trying to organise specialist care (which will involve specialist funding… a whole other topic) for my child, who is three and a half years in to a terrifying, traumatising journey through Anorexia Nervosa.
This article has proved hard to write because their journey has been so complicated and fraught. We have learnt to have fun in the most trying of circumstances, but the whole family is different in mind and body from the people we were four years ago. I have had many question me, “So what triggered it?”
I used to try to answer but I don’t anymore, because it’s very complicated.
Family history of eating disorders and other mental health illness raise your chances of developing an eating disorder yourself.
Females, with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), are four times more likely to develop an ED, 20 per cent of those diagnosed with Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) are autistic; there is an established link between autism and Anorexia. Trauma, as one friend assured me must be the cause… except where was our child’s trauma? I have since learnt more about trauma, and don’t discount this as part of the picture. Certainly, trauma experienced through their treatment has complicated matters and made it even tougher to access further help, as trust has been lost in the very services that could save my child’s life.
Social media has been blamed by most well-meaning people… but, for my child, this started before they had access to social media. Do I think that social media is a healthy place for those susceptible to eating disorders? No, I really don’t. But I think that social media reflects our culture, particularly our diet culture.
Is there a workplace where diets and weight aren’t constantly discussed? They run diet clubs in our primary schools. At this point, someone says, but what about the obesity crisis? Eating disorders, although pre-existing in society, started to rise at a previously unseen rate from the early 1970s. More than 1 1/4 million people in the UK now have an eating disorder. Rates of ‘obesity’ have risen steadily from the same period, being termed a crisis from the early 1990s. Is it a coincidence that the best-known weight loss club arrived in the UK in 1967?
Social media is reflecting a wider unhealthy obsession with size and diet; it is insidious, and it is everywhere. I have tried to protect my children from diet culture as much as possible, but it is delivered on the healthy eating plate at school, a recognised trigger for many children. It is delivered in films, at parties, by well-meaning friends and relatives and medical professionals and it is there in you. It’s like microplastics!
I don’t doubt diet culture is responsible for the rise in eating disorders, but why would my child succumb and another, brought up in a constantly dieting household, be apparently okay? Well, we don’t really know, but another potential factor we all missed was the fact that they are autistic. They have sensory food difficulties which were hard to see in a child that was compliant and well-mannered at mealtimes but, on reflection, were always there.
This is a trigger common to ARFID too, the theme of EDAW 2024. My child has anorexia nervosa with autistic-related eating difficulties. I don’t know why, but it isn’t because they don’t understand what it is doing to them, they aren’t seeking attention or being manipulative, they want to live but they are scared. As my friend’s child with ARFID said, ‘It isn’t a choice; it is impossible.’
For more information and support on eating disorders go to beateatingdisorders.org.uk
For campaigning @hopevirgo
If you or someone you care about needs help, contact your GP.
