Last month, former president of the high court Mr Justice Peter Kelly warned that Ireland’s services for people with eating disorders were inadequate, causing “unnecessary distress” and forcing some patients to go to the UK for treatment.
Six months previously, in January, doctors writing in the Irish Medical Journal noted that the number of hospital admissions for eating disorders had increased 66 per cent between 2019 and 2020. More training and resources psychological medical teams at paediatric hospitals are “vital and urgently needed”, they wrote.
There are currently just three eating disorder beds for adults in the HSE system, and four in-patient mental health units for under-18s. Eating disorders are a serious and often fatal condition and have been found to have the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric disorder. Yet in Ireland, patients suffering from this illness, and their parents, say they are forgotten by health services.
The Cared (Caring about Recovery from Eating Disorders) Ireland support group for parents recently called on Minister of State for Mental Health Mary Butler to urgently address this hidden health crisis and establish a dedicated national service for eating disorder treatments.
One member of Cared, a mother with a grown-up daughter suffering from anorexia, spoke to presenter Sorcha Pollak about how eating disorders "break every relationship" around the patient.
She warned of the “stigma” that still exists towards young people suffering from eating disorders and said HSE measures to support these patients are “just not enough”.
“We still have parents who are being blamed.... one of the parents was told last week, ‘your daughter was in hospital a month, she should just be eating now’. It doesn’t work like that.”
Irish Times social affairs correspondent Kitty Holland spoke of the implications of making adult patients wards of the court so as to receive naso-gastric feeding, adding that in other common law jurisdictions this type of tube feeding is part of the treatment for severe eating disorders.
Holland described eating disorders as “a misunderstood and complex illness” which requires a “specialised approach” which is not publicly available in Ireland. “It’s an illness and a condition that I think, because it mostly affects women, there’s less attention given to it and less motivation to really try and understand it, which is worrying.”
Holland also reflected on her own battle with the illness in her late teens and early twenties. “It was a way of feeling a sense of control over a life that felt like I had no control over,” she said. “It was my identity. And I didn’t know what life would be like without it.”
Cared Ireland can be reached at caredireland@gmail.com
Bodywhys can be contacted at 01 2107906 or alex@bodywhys.ie
In the News is presented by reporters Sorcha Pollak and Conor Pope.
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