Being diagnosed with anorexia nervosa as a heterosexual, non-athletic male felt quite anomalous to me in December 2015. Yet now it seems that my admission to a disorders centre was part of a much bigger picture.
Last Monday, the BBC broadcast Men, Boys and Eating Disorders, a Panorama investigation to coincide with new figures revealing that the number of men referred to eating disorder services has risen from 616 to 871 cases between 2014 and 2016.
Mine was a reluctant diagnosis, and one that came only after numerous tests and scans to rule out a number of diseases which might have caused my weight loss. I had been quite certain that I could not possibly be anorexic because I was neither an adolescent female nor not eating. Such logic did, I can now see, overlook the fact that eating disorders do not discriminate by gender, and my diet was sorely lacking.
I entered specialist treatment after two weeks in general hospital, where I’d been rushed by a concerned GP, who had discovered my body to be at risk of shutting down from brachycardia, hypoglycaemia and hypotension. While I had been told in January that my weight wasn’t low enough for services, come March the news was that I was too ill for the same help. By the end of the month I was being nasogastrically fed through a tube to force me into the stable body condition that my rejection of food was denying me. On the plus side, I was ready to be transferred to the Yorkshire Centre for Eating Disorders at Seacroft, Leeds.
The stereotype of eating disorders being predominantly associated with women is not entirely unjustified. Through the entirety of my admission I met one other man, and approximately 30 women. Life as a male patient on an almost exclusively female ward made for an isolated eight months. I never felt unwelcome, but the two male (of 21) beds were located far from the hub of the ward at the end of a long corridor.
Eating disorder services are non-standardised across the country and I can only speak from my own experiences. At Seacroft, Mondays and Thursdays were the big days. Between 6am and 7am we would be weighed, having been told not to drink for the preceding six hours, and to pay a trip to the toilet. Such was my muddled mental state at the time, my routine began earlier to ensure I might go to the toilet twice before being weighed – neither time would I wash my hands out of fear that the tap water would absorb into my skin and increase the number on the scales. It was on these days, every five weeks, that we would also meet with our care team for review.
Food was, of course, a sticky issue. Meal times were at 8am, 12pm and 5pm, with snacks at 10.15am and 3.15pm and 9pm. A full weight-gain meal plan would typically consist of: a bowl of cereal, two slices of toast, a sandwich or jacket potato with crisps or five-bean salad, a yoghurt or ice-cream, a hot dinner, a substantial pudding, and a snack before bed. We were also to drink a pint of milk each day, with snacks added if weight gain wasn’t forthcoming – the requirement was a gain of at least 0.8kg a week. It would be fair to say that some of the meal combinations we were faced with were odd due to the hospital catering menu clashing with the ward requirements – pasta and disc-shaped mashed potato, anyone? – but meals were designed to be regular portion sizes. Not that they seemed anything short of inhumanely enormous to new admissions.
There is nothing fun about the mental torment of an eating disorder, but life was not unremittingly grim for me at Seacroft. This was predominately due to the presence of patients who I found to be among the most kind-hearted and inspirational individuals I have ever met. Every day, their ability to wake up, fight and keep smiling against the odds is like nothing I have ever experienced. It is thanks to them that I somehow have treasured memories from my admission. When all seems lost it is the small moments that matter most.
Treatment on such wards is largely based around the discussion of emotions. It’s a mode of recovery which seems more tailored to female patients; the lack of male staff members was also noticeable. I am loth to complain about the services and the team on the ward, who were instrumental in my journey to recovery. There is, however, a deeply off-putting lack of specialism for male patients. Discussions around body image were female-orientated, for example – and my case was not considered to be any different to any other patient on the ward.
The perception is that at an unhealthy weight the sufferer is ill; and once a healthier body mass has been attained, the sufferer is said to have achieved a – typically “inspirational” – recovery. Yet nine months on from my discharge from the ward, and now at a healthy weight, I don’t consider myself to have fully “recovered”. I’m out of the thicket and I’m not going back, but so many are only just beginning the process of recovery, while more still suffer in silence. Let these latest statistics demonstrate that mental illness knows no discrimination.
