Last week, I had a long conversation with a woman who is trying desperately to loosen the awful grip of an eating disorder. She wanted to remain anonymous; for the sake of this article, I’ll call her Jane. She is in her 30s and lives in Norfolk. Her illness, first diagnosed when she was a teenager, is known as the restricting type of anorexia, meaning that she has a long history of drastically limiting her food intake to the point of self-starvation.
Over the past 10 years or so, she has spent some of her time as an NHS inpatient. She told me about her first stay in a specialist ward, where there was “a massive turnover of staff. We all knew we needed therapy, and we couldn’t get it.” She was once moved to a residential facility hundreds of miles from home, in Scotland: “You’d hear people screaming and being held down while they were fed.” And again and again, she talked about the impossibility of coping with the repeated switch from this kind of 24/7 care to the woefully inadequate visits she received when she was allowed to go home.
