Tackling agony of anore xia face to face, newsreader and daughter he nearly lost

HE recently admitted that his teenage daughter’s anorexia had brought him to the brink of despair.

And now former ITV newsreader Mark Austin has spoken candidly with his daughter Maddy about her battle with the illness, saying ‘you were completely determined to kill yourself’.

In an emotional video for the mental health campaign Heads Together, he spoke of his heartbreak at watching his daughter ‘waste away’ to just 5½ stone.

He told her: ‘I could never understand what had triggered you from being a normal, healthy 17-year-old to lose so much weight so quickly.’

Maddy, who is now 22 and studying at university, replied: ‘I think I always had this underlying depression, this underlying low, where I always felt like I wasn’t good enough.’

Her father met her comments with disbelief, shaking his head as they discussed the condition that led Maddy, a former Olympic hopeful, to drop dramatically in weight in 2012.

She continued: ‘The only way that I could show the world I wasn’t okay was by controlling what I was eating, by losing weight, by having this one thing I could control. Anorexia was a way of me showing that I wasn’t OK.’

Austin, 58, explained to her that he found it impossible to know how to help, saying: ‘I couldn’t even come to terms with how to stop it or how to help you, it was like you were completely determined to kill yourself.’

‘I got it badly wrong, we got it badly wrong. But then I don’t know how people would know how to deal with that, watching your daughter wasting away.’

The father- of-three first opened up about Maddy’s anorexia last month, confessing he had initially thought she was being ‘crass, insensitive, selfish and pathetic’.

In a frank article for The Sunday Times, he wrote: ‘I even remember saying, “If you really want to starve yourself to death, just get on with it”. And at least once, exasperated and at a loss, I think I actually meant it.

‘What I failed utterly to grasp was that she was seriously men- tally ill and could not see a future for herself.’

He also told how he would present the News at Ten while wondering whether his daughter, who was a successful 800m runner, would survive the night.

The breakthrough only came when Maddy attended an NHS clinic at Farnham Hospital in Surrey as a day patient, with monitored mealtimes and intensive counselling.

The video of the Austins was one of ten films commissioned by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry for the Heads Together campaign.

‘Insensitive, selfish and pathetic’ Mark Austin to his daughter Maddy

I couldn’t come to terms with how to stop it ... it was like you were completely determined to kill yourself