My daughter is anorexic

Anorexia: lots of questions, not many answers. Photo by Meg Wills

What made our child want to kill herself day-by-day, ounce-by-ounce, right in front of our disbelieving eyes? What in God’s name did we do so wrong that the child we love should wish to wreak such terrible damage upon herself?

That’s what you ask when your daughter – or with increasing frequency, your son – becomes anorexic. Because anorexia is not just a matter of being, as the papers like to put it, ‘worryingly thin’. It’s not a diet that’s gone a bit too far, or a girl who looks a bit peaky.

Anorexia is a serious mental illness whose ultimate aim is self-annihilation. Anorexia is a demon that transforms a beautiful, apparently happy child into a living skeleton, possessed by rage and fury, screaming out venomous fury then hating you all the more for trying so hard to help her.

You ask, but you don’t get an answer. Plenty of people will tell you why young people become anorexic. They say it is the result of media pressure to have the perfect body. Or they claim it’s a manifestation of psychological problems within the family. Or a fear of growing up. Or genetic. But if you ask the experts, the consultants who deal with anorexia all day, every day, they have a very different, very simple answer: “We don’t know.”

There is no provable cause of anorexia, just as there is no definitive cure. Well, there is a very simple cure: eat more. But what there isn’t is any guaranteed means of getting an anorexic to do that, of persuading them that their vision of themselves is an illusion; that they are not better for being thinner; that they are actually very ill indeed; that they are, in fact, dying.

Anorexia has the highest death rate of any mental illness. According to a study by America’s National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, five to ten per cent of anorexics die within ten years of contracting the disease, 18-20 per cent of anorexics will be dead after 20 years, and only 30–40 per cent ever fully recover.

My daughter may be one of the lucky ones. We cannot be certain. She’s always been a skinny little slip of a girl. Perhaps that’s why it took us so long to recognise that she had a problem. There came a point, however, when it was undeniable.

By the time she was admitted to hospital she had gone down to a little over five stone and was in imminent danger of total, fatal organ failure. She had the shrivelled, skeletal body of a concentration camp victim. Her face was shrunken and her eyes were sunk in deep black pits of shadow. The hair on her head was as thin as an old lady’s, but a pelt of fine down covered her skin: the body’s desperate attempt to retain warmth when all fat had long since disappeared.

She does not look like that now. She looks like a beautiful, healthy young woman. Yet she remains an anorexic, for, like a recovering alcoholic, she could always slip back into her disease. Anorexia is tenacious. It does not willingly let go its grip. You just wait, for all the months and even years it takes to treat an anorexic and hope that one day things will change.

Then, perhaps, if you are very lucky, you will finally see the girl you’ve always loved and know that your daughter has come back home again.