Imagine you feel so overwhelmed by your feelings that you cope by cutting down on food…

Imagine that as you lose weight you start to feel a bit more in control and a bit better…

Imagine that you start hearing a voice that tells you to eat less and less…

Now imagine the voice shouts at your when you eat, tells you you’re stupid, fat, lazy…

Imagine that the only thing that makes sense in your life is not eating and losing weight…

Imagine that one day you start to feel scared of this thing that once made sense…

Imagine that you think you might need some help because you’re scared of your thoughts, scared of this voice, scared that you might actually be unwell. You’re scared of getting help but you’re more scared of not getting help…

Now imagine, you’re told, you’re not sick enough, your weight is too high, you’re not skinny enough to get help…

Now, that voice will scream at you even louder because not only did you consider fighting back against the voice but a professional has actually agreed with the voice that you should be skinnier…

This is what is happening up and down the country because the NHS doesn’t have enough money to help everyone and they have to find some way of deciding who they can help.

This is a crisis within the NHS.

I was tossed from service to service with a number of different mental health difficulties…on numerous occasions I would admit that I wasn’t eating or that I was making myself sick or doing a number of other disordered behaviours but my BMI was never quite low enough for that side of things to be taken seriously. When it finally was, I was offered “psychoeducation” (would you believe my computer wanted to change that to “psyched inaction”?!) because my BMI was 17. My BMI had to drop below 15 before I was offered more intense support. I did not deliberately drop my BMI to get the support, it was something that naturally happened because I was ill, I didn’t understand what was going on and no amount of “education” about what my body needed was going to stop the torment inside my head that told me I was stupid, fat and lazy and had to lose weight at all costs. If, however, I’d been offered more intense support earlier, I know I would have recovered more quickly and cost the NHS less as I would have needed fewer therapy sessions to undo the extra damage that had been done.

These barriers to treatment are a false economy. Assessing anorexia and other eating disorders on physical signs alone does not take into account the fact that there are complex mental elements to the disorders. Mental health services need more funding so they can:

• Stop only treating the critically physically ill
• Treat everyone with a mental illness who needs it, when they need it
• Support people for as long as they need it instead of cutting treatment short

Related articles:

• Independent
• BBC
• Telegraph
• B-eat