Eating Disorders and its impact on the family
You are probably going though the most difficult and challenging time of your life, coping with and caring for a loved one with an eating disorder.
Eating disorders cause an enormous stress on families as the person and the illness become the centre of the family. It can seriously affect relationships between siblings, parents, relatives and carers and cause significant stress and tension in marriages. Often there is financial stress too as one or both parents give up work to try and cope with their sick child. Extended family and friends may be unable to fully grasp the all encompassing devastation an eating disorder has on normal family life.
As parents on this journey we offer some advice that we hope will help.
"....The story featured flippant comments about anorexia being due to (a sufferer's) problems with her mother. In my experience of being in a residential care facility for nine months, I found that the illness was certainly not due to issues with mothers. I believe our mothers have provided all of us with the most enormous amount of love, patience and determination. I cannot even begin to imagine what this illness does to them....watching their children starve themselves to death.
Magazines, television, the internet and billboards have a huge amount to answer for.
I love my mum and she has battled so hard to keep me alive. It sickens me when she is victimised - she already questions whether she has done something wrong."
Part of a letter to Sunday Star Times August 2008 ( replying to an article Bones of Contention. July 27)
