Beaten by anorexia

Anorexia is the most deadly of all mental health conditions. As many as 20% of all anorexics die from the disease. They die from both the physical effects of starvation, such as heart problems and electrolyte imbalances, and suicide, being unable to live with the torture of anorexia and living with anorexia in our society.

My daughter is just 5 and while an anorexic in the sense that she doesn’t like to eat, is vastly underweight and clearly terrified of food, she has no weight issues…yet. We have been told that they may well develop if we can’t get her eating properly before she hits teenage years.

Strange as it may sound though, I sometimes long for her to be a teenager with anorexia. There are clear and well-defined treatments for teenage anorexics. The Maudsley method has been shown to be effective in as many as half of all cases. The Maudsley method involves parents deciding what the child should eat and the child/ teenager sitting down at each meal and eating what is provided. Parents also decide how much the anorexic can exercise and this is also followed. It is a method of family based therapy and for many appears to work.

Adult treatments are now beginning to follow this line too, with family and friends becoming part of the therapy for the anorexics. Family members or friends take on monitoring roles to make sure anorexics eat enough and that their diet contains enough of the different food groups to be complete.

This way of taking on responsibility for another’s diet and demanding people eat seems like magic to me. I cannot demand that my daughter eats. She just won’t. Our approach is apparently not to mention the fact that she doesn’t eat, not to pressurise her to eat, to remove all stress around eating and then apparently she will eat. She isn’t though. I like the idea of her having to eat and my being able to control it. I yearn to control her eating for her. Instead I have to control my urges to ram donuts down her throat.

She is consuming more than she was a few weeks ago, but it’s not enough. She is currently living off 600–900kcals a day. I have become so tired living with the pressure of her not eating, not getting better I almost want her to go into hospital now. For someone else to take the strain and be responsible for her survival. I am almost ready for her to be tube fed, just so that I don’t have to be in the driving seat any more.

I feel guilty about this desire to not care for my daughter. But I am so so so tired of trying and failing to care for her. The solutions don’t work. I don’t understand what to do next. I just want this episode to end now.