PART THREE of the notes I was making as my son hurtled into anorexia in late 2009...

By October 2009, my son's emerging eating disorder was raging. We'd eventually managed to get the GP to refer Ben for eating disorder treatment, but - to my horror and panic - we'd been put on a waiting list which could mean a 18-22 week wait before an assessment, let alone the start of treatment for his anorexia. And who was to say that treatment would immediately stop the eating disorder in its tracks?

I'm wondering if any of this rings a bell with you, if you're worried your son might be developing an eating disorder? That's why I've decided to publish this document. It's quite lengthy, so this is Part Three.

From my Notes.docx file (Part Three):

November 2009

Around mid November, things came to a head after two particularly bad weeks.

In desperation I had a talk with the school nurse who had a long talk with Ben which seemed to do some good. 

For the first time, he actually admitted there was a problem and explained how trapped he felt by it all – and how it wasn’t actually achieving what he had set out to achieve, and that it was a ‘control’ issue. 

He felt almost imprisoned by it all. But he felt he didn’t have the personal strength to get out of this alone. 

We eventually got the GP to refer him to CAMHS (eating disorders), however we were told that the waiting list for eating disorder treatment was 18-22 weeks. 

After lots of long talks and support from us, his parents, I felt that we might actually be doing some good and preventing the eating disorder from getting worse. [However we were quickly proved wrong as the eating disorder began to fall off a cliff.]

Ben was terrified that he'd get out of control with eating and would get fat (like his ‘puppy fat’ days at primary school). 

He was still under-eating. He needed to lose this need for control, this fear of eating the ‘wrong’ things. He needed to lose his obsession with food. 

With the CAMHS treatment so far away, we started to panic. We simply had to do something to stop our son from disappearing in front of our eyes, physically and mentally. 

In the end we managed to find a private therapist who provided a bit of 'stop gap' treatment, but it wasn't ideal (thankfully we had some private health insurance which helped a little with the fees). 

But the Good Thing that came out of this was that the therapist got Ben to start putting together a 'positive diary' of daily positive thoughts and actions. [In the event, he ditched the diary, throwing it across the room, yelling that it was a waste of time because he didn't have any positive thoughts; they were all negative.]

But still the CAMHS waiting list loomed ahead. What state would Ben be in by the time our place came up at Easter? And how many assessments would we have to go through before the actual anorexia treatment started and, more crucially, began to take effect?

[I had no idea at this stage, that eating disorder treatment can take years. I truly thought anorexia was something that could be fixed quickly.]