Gillian Keegan urged to improve access to eating disorder services
A mental health campaigner has said that the current state of eating disorder services in the UK is ‘absolutely appalling’ and has called on Chichester MP Gillian Keegan to take action.
Hope Virgo is the campaigner behind the
Dump the Scales petition, which calls for treatment to be made more readily available to people with eating disorders, regardless of their Body Mass Index (BMI). She was inspired to start the campaign after being denied treatment for an eating disorder because she ‘wasn’t thin enough for support’.
Since the petition began almost four years ago, it has amassed more than 100,000 signatures. Now, Mrs Virgo is urging her supporters to take the next step and demand Chichester MP Gillian
Keegan takes action to tackle the discrepancies in accessibility to eating disorder treatment.
Mrs Keegan, minister for care and mental health, has worked with Mrs
Virgo in the past – yet the campaigner still believes that the government ‘just don’t take eating disorders seriously’. Currently, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) guidelines state: “Do not use single measures such as BMI or duration of illness to determine whether to offer treatment for an Eating Disorder.” But Mrs Virgo said that ‘this is simply not being implemented’.
“[Eating disorder services] are still based on whether a person has a low enough BMI in order to access support and treatment, which is wrong on so many levels because we know that eating disorders aren’t about food, they’re not about weight. You cannot judge the severity of someone’s eating disorder based on their BMI.”
In March 2021 the government released its ‘mental health recovery plan’. This outlined the funding that will be directed to NHS services, including: £500 million to support people for all mental health issues – with £79 million of this being used to expand children’s mental health services – and £40 million provided by the NHS for children’s eating disorder treatment.
Additionally, Mrs Keegan said the government will invest £58 million to ‘expand
adult community mental health services, including those for eating disorders’.
She said: “We are also expanding children’s mental health and eating disorder services, including by investing an extra £79 million, enabling at least 2,000 more children and young people to access eating disorder services. Eating disorders can be devastating for people living with them and we want to ensure that everyone has access to the right support.”
Under the NHS Long Term Plan, ‘almost £1 billion extra’ will also be invested into community mental health care for adults by 2023/24, which will provide support for 370,000 adults with severe mental illnesses, ‘including eating disorders’.
Despite this, Mrs Virgo said there has been ‘no indication’ of what percentage of these funds will be directed primarily to adult eating disorder services, despite the demographic making up about 70 per cent of patients requiring hospitalisation, and that ‘most of the money is not hitting the front line’.
Speaking about the government’s lack of action, Mrs Virgo said: “We are back to square one with a new mental health strategy consultation about to kick off.
“[Mrs Keegan] gave a commitment – we felt – that she was going to support this moving forward, and particularly look at developing a strategy to tackle this. Following that, I think it was in December that the government re-shifted all of their priorities around mental health. You say one thing and they’ve then shifted everything, and, again, they don’t see it as that urgent issue to tackle.
“We’re often being told that in 10 years’ time we’re going to have this much investment into services but actually the fact that people are dying, every single day, because of an eating disorder in 2022, when it’s an illness that’s treatable and preventable, is just not okay. Honestly, I don’t think enough is being done.”
Mrs Virgo suffered from anorexia nervosa herself as a teenager, spending many years hospitalised and ‘on the brink of death’. After her grandmother died in 2016, she relapsed and decided to seek help again.
However, when she built up the courage to speak to a professional, Mrs Virgo was denied support due to her weight not being low enough.
She said: “I ticked every box to access treatment [but] because I wasn’t underweight, there wasn’t anything they could do for me. I had this sort of competitive part of the anorexia in my head telling me that I wasn’t deserving enough for the support, that I wasn’t worthy enough, that I wasn’t sick enough, that people didn’t get it.
“The fact that [BMI] seems to be the gatekeeper for things at the moment is just completely wrong. It’s also frustrating because we know there has been this huge increase over the pandemic of adults and children really, really struggling, but yet we’re just not seeing this as a matter of urgency.”
Bethan Legg, 23, from Chichester, was diagnosed with anorexia at age 11.
After spending years fighting for treatment, her weight finally dropped low enough to be eligible for support – by this point, her BMI was considered extremely severe, according to diagnostic criteria. Miss Legg was hospitalised in a specialist eating disorder unit, which she said just made her ‘more obsessive as it was all calorie controlled and about weight gain’.
Despite being weight restored and improving mentally since then, Miss Legg began to struggle again during lockdown and decided to seek support again.
She reached out on November 23, 2020, and received a response from Adult Mental Health Services (AMHS) stating she was ‘on a waiting list’ in March 2021. It wasn’t until January 2022 that Miss Legg was contacted again, requesting a blood test and stating that she would need to be weighed.
She said: “My BMI is only slightly below average, therefore I’m presuming that’s why I still haven’t heard anything about getting help from an eating disorder specialist.”
With anorexia nervosa having the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness, waiting times like these can be deadly but it is a reality for many sufferers in the UK.
Mrs Virgo said: “I’d like [the government] to understand that eating disorders are serious mental health issues, that they’re not a choice or something someone grows out of.
“It’s an illness that not only completely destroys the person’s life who’s living with the eating disorder, but it can destroy the family network, the carer’s network, the whole support around them as well.
“It can also have life-lasting impacts on that person which, from a government perspective, we know that will have an impact on the economy as well.
“I believe that we need an immediate injection of funding into both children and adult services.
“Unless we start to tackle this as a matter of urgency, the number of people dying on a day-to-day basis from an eating disorder will just keep on increasing.”
To find out more about Hope Virgo’s campaigns, sign the Dump the Scales petition and follow her on Instagram.
For information about finding support for eating disorders, visit: www. beateatingdisorders.org.uk.