Why are some eating disorder treatment teams still using outdated treatment models?

I feel a mixture of anger, sadness and fear when, in the modern world, in 2017, I hear about advice that's being given to parents of young people with eating disorders that's so very out of date. Advice like we received eight years ago along the lines of 'Don't keep going on about food, it makes him/her anxious... it's not helpful to him/her'. Worse, for food to be pretty much taken off the agenda except for playing a small 'bit part' role in the background. Or, as we were told just before the Summer of Horror in 2010, to 'take a break from the eating disorder' for the duration of our two-week family vacation. Can you believe that?

It's vital that the parents get support when their child has an eating disorder

The other day I was having a discussion with a friend about how both of us had little or no support during the months and years that our children were suffering from anorexia. It was almost as if, as parents, it was our job to 'just get on with it'.

The fact that, outside the treatment room, we were having to deal with the hellish nightmare of an eating disorder in the family, hour in hour out, day in day out, month in month out, year in year out was pretty much ignored.

Saturday night it was about catching trains, last night it was about exams... I still have high-anxiety nightmares

I have to catch a specific train but everything is preventing me from doing so: I'm at the wrong station, I haven't bought my ticket, there's a queue for tickets that's moving at a snail's pace, there's no information on platforms and no platform numbers, I'm waiting for people to catch me up... and so on and so forth... Or, like last night, I'm about to sit the most important exam of my life yet I haven't done any revision. I haven't even been to lessons. I know zero about the subject. There are other variations on the high-anxiety nightmare, but these are the two most common nightmares I've been having for the past eight years or so.

"Will my son always be stuck standing short of the 'finish line'?" I asked myself in September 2015

In September 2015 I was toying with the idea of writing a sequel to my book Please eat... A mother's struggle to free her teenage son from anorexia and I wrote this in the Diaro app:

The book will be about me 

Rather than my son. Mainly. How I coped (or didn't) with getting my life back. The blips we had, my worries about his weight and relapse. He is not the person he used to be and it's upsetting. But might he have been this person regardless?

Struggling to cope in a post-eating-disorder life? You are not alone...

Because I know I'm not alone in having struggled with serious trauma symptoms as our family emerged from the anorexia years, I've decided to write the occasional post about what I found myself going through from around 2015 onwards. It will be about the (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) symptoms and how I coped (or didn't cope) with them in the hope of helping other parents to identify with similar experiences. It will also be about other stuff that was going around in circles inside my head. Most importantly the aim will be to show you that you are not alone in feeling like this.

Back onto the subject of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder...

One thing my EMDR ( Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) therapist said at the start of treatment was that, as well as throwing up key memories of dealing with my son's often violent eating disorder, EMDR would probably bring old traumas back to mind. He was right - and I know I'm not the only (post-eating-disorder) mum who has experienced this.

It might be a traumatic birth experience (as it was with my son, Ben), the sudden death of a loved one, being in or witnessing a serious car accident or a myriad of other past traumas... whatever is lurking in the dark recesses of the mind, unprocessed, then it could come to light during the EMDR treatment.

Here's what my son, Ben, is saying on World Mental Health Day today

If you've not seen it yet, you live in the UK and you don't think it will trigger you, BBC3's recent drama Overshadowed, A vlogger's life spirals out of control. The reason? Her new “best friend” Anna. You can watch it here on BBC iPlayer.

This is a very real portrayal of what an eating disorder like Anorexia can be really like, written by a former sufferer who plays 'Anna' in the drama (the 'eating disorder voice').

The incident in the friend's bathroom is particularly reminiscent of our own experiences with Anorexia; it reminds me of the time when my son had his friends round for a sleepover on that first Christmas with the eating disorder in 2009. Something set him off and he came screaming downstairs in the middle of the night in a similar state to Imo in Episode 6.