An 18-year-old woman who developed severe psoriasis all over her body due to the trauma of being sexually abused from the age of eight to 11, then endured school bullying and did not want to leave the house due to her condition, has found a cure that is “nothing short of a miracle”.
Ellie Douglass, from Newcastle, who is job hunting, was relentlessly bullied at school because of her skin, making her feel “isolated”, and started skipping classes, leaving her with just one GCSE.
Since leaving school, she has struggled to get a job because employers were concerned about her skin condition and she was turned down numerous times for waitressing jobs as bosses thought her skin would flake into customers’ food.
Ellie has depression and anxiety and remains traumatised by her sexual abuse – which she does not wish to share further details about. She received therapy for around a year at 14 after the abuse was recognised, but has been waiting for the past two years for more sessions.
Ellie tried everything from steroid creams and light therapy to coal tar treatments for her skin, but nothing seemed to work until she tried Oregon Skincare’s shampoo. It cleared her skin up in around a month, and she feels “so much more confident”.
“Before I tried the cream that cured it, I felt like I always had to explain myself to new people because it’s not a very attractive thing, and people used to stare at it,” she said.
“Now, I feel so much more comfortable in my skin, and I think it made me realise everyone has their own thing that makes them them.
“We’ve got to embrace these things, and in life, there will always be ups and downs.
“The improvements I have seen so far have been nothing short of a miracle… I feel so much more confident, it’s amazing.
“I can sleep more easily as my head isn’t itching like crazy, and I am much less anxious about going out in public now as people no longer stare at me.”
When Ellie was eight, she began suffering sexual abuse, which continued for three years without anyone knowing.
At 10, she broke out in patches of psoriasis on her chest and neck which eventually spread all over her body.
She said: “Doctors said that it could have been eczema, and then we realised it was psoriasis, and no one knew I was being sexually abused.”
Once the abuse was recognised, doctors told her it was the likely cause of her psoriasis as the condition can be triggered by trauma, and Ellie began therapy through the NHS.
She said: “It helped me a lot to process what had happened to me, but honestly, it wasn’t enough.
“They only gave me therapy for about a year, and then I was more or less left to my own devices.”
At school, Ellie could cover up only so much of her psoriasis, and once her peers noticed her skin condition, she started to be bullied.
She said: “I was still suffering a lot of mental anguish from the abuse, which made me quite insular and at the same time, my skin was covered in psoriasis, so I was badly bullied at school.
“I felt so low and depressed and so self-conscious because of my skin, it was a really horrible time of my life.
“I just used to think that I’d do anything to make my skin look normal.”
Ellie changed schools twice to try to get away from the bullying, but she could not escape it and became “more and more isolated”.
The bullying became so severe that Ellie started skipping school, and she was transferred to a special support unit for trauma victims in year 11.
She explained: “I felt much safer and more supported, so I managed to get some schoolwork done for my GCSEs.
“But I only passed English as I had missed so much school before it was almost impossible for me to catch up.”
After leaving secondary school, Ellie was unsure what she wanted to do, so she tried to get a job, but even potential bosses were unkind about her skin.
She said: “I tried to get work serving food and waitressing, but often I’d get turned down because they told me they were worried what the customer would say or that my flaking skin would get in the food.”
Ellie’s mental health was at an all-time low, and she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression.
She said: “For a while, I was just drifting around without direction – I was completely lost.
“I had no support in terms of therapy, I only had my family and a few friends to help me.
“I had so much anxiety I could barely leave the house for a while.”
Due to the worsening state of Ellie’s skin and her struggle to deal with the trauma, she tried to access more therapy through the NHS, but her treatment was delayed because of the pandemic.
She said: “I just dropped off the system’s radar, and once you are out of the system, it’s almost impossible to get back in it.”
Ellie is still waiting to receive therapy through the NHS and is keen to address the trauma she experienced as a child.
Over the years, she had tried almost every treatment for her skin that she can, including steroid creams, coal tar treatments and light therapy, but has seen little improvement.
At the end of 2021, Ellie decided to stop taking all the medication she was given as it was not working.
Around the same time, just before Christmas, Ellie’s grandmother saw a new treatment in a magazine, Oregon Skincare, and Ellie decided to give it a go. To her amazement, her skin started to clear.
She said: “My nan ordered me the shampoo to try as my face and scalp psoriasis was really upsetting me.
“After only three uses of the shampoo, I could see the redness and plaques were already going down on my face, which at the time looked like I had burns.”
After a month of use, almost all of Ellie’s psoriasis on her scalp, hairline and neck had more or less gone.
Looking to the future, Ellie hopes to receive more therapy once the NHS finds space for her.
She said: “With psoriasis from trauma like mine, therapy to help you to find coping mechanisms combined with effective skin treatments can start to get control over it, so I am hopeful for the future.
“I’m hoping to get off my medication soon and that I might one day be able to move into counselling or maybe animal therapy to help others who are going through similar trauma as I have been through to see there’s a brighter future and that there are ways to deal with it.”
