Our young writer has first hand experience

I’m sixteen and I suffer from anorexia. It all began when I got bullied at school. This lad picked on me and I thought I’d just get dug in a hole, so I never used to go and I miss out on my lunches. I think that’s when it began but it weren’t so bad then. It’s got worse over the years though.

The abuse I suffered wasn’t physical, it was mental abuse. It was mainly that lad but there were other people. I wasn’t ‘Miss Popularity’. People used to ignore me when it got really bad. I lost my so-called best friend because of it. I got really depressed and tried to hang myself. To cut a long story short I got taken out of the school and given prozac by the doctor. After that I had a tutor so I didn’t go to school. We used to do lessons at the Mill Hill Centre and just normal school work.

A couple of years later I went to EORTAS. It stands for Education Other Than At School. It got miles worse when I went there really. I don’t really know why it got worse, it just did. I don’t think there is a reason for it.

Anorexia means a loss of appetite but I don’t know whether there are lots of other things besides that. You feel good if you skip your meals, there’s this boost of energy. I find it strange to talk about. I used to say that I had had my meals and bring my wrappers back so my mum thought that I was eating. She told the doctor that I hadn’t grown since I was young but the doctor told her that I would grow all at once, they didn’t know that I had anorexia. I think the system failed really because my mum kept telling the doctors and they just said that I’ll grow all at once. I used to swear-down that I had had something to eat, like at lunch, but I just used to lie.

I went to my doctors after I had been into Queens Park Hospital, my mum had found out about this psychiatric hospital in Manchester, and he helped me to get in there. When I went in I thought I’m going to get help. It was a group of anorexics but there was competition all the time. I used to eat my meals and then they would give us half an hour supervision, but after that half an hour I would just go to the toilet and throw up. That’s what the other anorexics would do as well. The competition was who could be the thinnest and stuff like that.

I made two close friends in the hospital, Amy and Sally. Amy had bad bulimia. She would eat loads of food and then go and be sick. She would even eat things that weren’t even edible at times. In Macdonald's she would eat a big meal and then go into the back-alley and make herself sick. She lost loads of weight so it didn’t really work for her and she had to leave before she died really. She’s fifteen. She has gone on to another place and she is getting better now. Sally is still in Manchester but she is not getting better really, like she’s not eating sometimes. She’s anorexic and when she went to school she would miss her lunches and tell her friends that she had eaten something, but she was lying and would just stay in the toilet.

There wasn’t really any therapy in the hospital. Your nurse would have a word with you but there was no groups, and then they would just talk to you for five minutes. So, I decided to discharge myself. It just wasn’t helping. You used to get weighed twice a week and at weekends I went home, and that’s when I would put on weight. So, I would lose weight during the week and then at weekends I would put weight on.

I stay with my mum now and she looks after me and watches what I eat. I have a job with Camelot doing the lottery but that’s on and off.

I used to like acting. I was fourteen the last time I did a festival. I did speech and drama Where you would do a poem and then you do like an acting piece on stage. That was at the library in Blackburn. I’ve also won certificates for acting as well. I enjoy it.

When I look ahead to the future I would like to become an actress. I will have to go to college and get my BTEC National Diploma. I went to college last year but it didn’t work out. When you suffer from anorexia you feel very self-conscious.


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