I felt so lonely and isolated at secondary school. Feelings of inadequacy would swamp my mind and make me feel awful about myself. To help me cope with these emotions I turned to exercise and diet restriction. I began to feel better about myself, but as the weight fell away I realised I was in too deep to go back to how I was, and I fell deeper and deeper into anorexia.
My mental and physical health spiralled out of control. Despite seeing three different GPs about my symptoms, I ended up in my local hospital at crisis point. My physical health was so bad that my mum was told by a nurse that she didn’t think I’d make it through the weekend.
I’m sure that I wouldn’t have fallen into crisis if GPs and other frontline staff were better trained in spotting an eating disorder and the mental illness laying behind the physical symptoms.
The help I received during two cycles of inpatient treatment for my eating disorder restored me to some semblance of health. Despite still struggling with self-harm and OCD, my age meant that I had to be transferred to adult services, which is where I fell off a cliff edge. Unable to cope with the thoughts and feelings driving me to hurt myself, I was self-harming around 100 times a day.
My family and I were forced to pay for private treatment as I’d been waiting several months for NHS adult services. It’s clear that the NHS didn’t have the resources, or the number of psychiatrists they needed, to treat people quickly. After a period of support from the multi-disciplinary team of mental health professionals, I genuinely felt hope for a way out of the mental illness I’d been held captive by.
But then the pandemic struck. Like so many others living with a mental illness, my health deteriorated quickly. After receiving a short-term crisis intervention, it again took many months to receive the care I desperately needed. Nonetheless, I was making progress. In the summer of 2020, I was able to restart therapy for my eating disorder, working with another practitioner I had known as a teenager, and in November I resumed a type of talking therapy called Dialectic Behaviour Therapy – something I’d been waiting five years for.
Even though I never met my therapist in person because of Covid, that intervention, along with continued eating disorder support, helped me to start making real changes. The light finally appeared at the end of the tunnel. After more than five years of self-harming behaviours and daily rituals, with the correct support, I have been able to enter remission and it is over two months since I last self-harmed.
I’ve learnt a lot over the last eight years. I’ve seen what good care looks like and the life-changing effect psychiatrists can have on people’s lives. But I’ve also experienced first-hand the dreadful deterioration in mental health when people are left on a waiting list for months on end because services don’t have enough staff.
The vacancy rate for psychiatrists working in eating disorders is at 17 per cent, according to the latest Royal College of Psychiatrists’ census. If services are to have the specialists they need to treat people in the future then it’s clear to me that we need a clear plan and long-term funding so more medical students choose psychiatry.
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