‘Anorexia gives me panic attacks - but help is months away’
It takes three years, on average, for someone to recognise they have an eating disorder. Even then, getting treatment isn’t always straightforward, as Ollie Kemp reports...
A teaching assistant who has struggled with anorexia for six years is concerned how long she and others will be made to wait for treatment, after being told the person at the front of the queue had been assessed 11 months ago. Kirsty Rowe, from Maidstone, struck up the courage to reach out for support in May after living with the eating disorder since she was 14 years old.
Now 20, she said: “For the past two years it’s got worse, and especially during lockdown it got really bad. “I would have panic attacks all the time and feel so scared, and it just got to the point where I thought, ‘I can’t carry on doing this.’
“I’ve looked back and realised small things happened in my life that were a sign that I was going to have an eating disorder.
“I would be quite particular with food - I would separate my food from anyone else’s, if someone else had touched my food I wouldn’t go near it, I didn’t like eating in front of people.
“It gets triggered when I realise things around me are out of my control. So when I was 14 I was at a point in my life where there was a lot going on around me that I didn’t know how to deal with emotionally - I couldn’t stop it and couldn’t control it, so I needed something to hold on to.
“If I went to Tesco and had planned my meals, if something I had planned wasn’t available I would get so anxious and have a panic attack - that’s not something that everyone else would do, they would just choose to have something else instead.” Kirsty, a teaching assistant at a special school in Ashford, explained having to queue up for food during lockdown made her shopping anxiety even worse, which prompted her to reach out and seek help again. She said: “Standing outside the shop and waiting was just building this anxiety and stress, it was such a traumatic experience for me.”
After finding support through her GP unhelpful in her teen years, Kirsty decided to seek help from the North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) which includes a specialist all-ages eating disorder service in Maidstone.
The NELFT websites states they will aim to offer an appointment to prospective patients within four weeks of applying.
Kirsty was assessed in just a week, but when cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was decided as a treatment plan, she was told she could be left waiting for much longer.
She was not told how many people were in front of her on the waiting list, but a member of staff said the person right at the top had been waiting since last August.
She said: “I didn’t really know what to say to them when they told me.
“It makes me angry - I think it’s ridiculous that you have to wait such a long time to get help for something like this. “I could have been in the mindset that this is them telling me I’m not sick enough, even though that’s not what they said.