Are We Reaching An Eating Disorders Crisis Point?

‘Would you rather be anorexic or bulimic?’, a friend once asked me at school. Recalling the memory of being faced with this quite casually in the sixth form common room makes me really uncomfortable now. My twenty-five-year-old brain knows that it's an insensitive, inappropriate question, and so far from the ‘funny’ spectrum. But at the time it didn't. At the time, it was just two sixteen-year-old girls talking really frankly abouteating disorders.

I remember conditions like anorexia and bulimia being things that my generation of young women were explicitly aware of. I remember it being dangerously trendy to say you have an eating disorder and conversations about such would score you major points in the mental health buzzword lottery; much like anxiety does today.

And while the number of young women with eating disorders has long been a cause for deep concern, we're currently seeing a huge rise in admissions to hospital with potentially life-threatening diagnosis of the conditions, many of whom fall into this demographic .

Figures from NHS Digital obtained by the Guardian show that in the last six years, the number of people admitted with a primary or secondary diagnosis of an eating disorder has almost doubled. The number peaked at 13,885 last April while six years earlier in the 2010-11 bracket there were 7260 admissions. The number of women under the age of 19 admitted for anorexia rose from 1050 to 2025 in that period.

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It’s no secret that the conversation around mental health in the general sense has changed over this period of time. We’ve watched, listened and participated as it was anxiety and depression’s turn to earn societal understanding as reinforced by vocal celebrities and social media influencers. But at the same time and via the same means we’ve watched as movements like #cleaneating rose in popularity (before eventually being debunked a few times over) which can’t have helped our wider understandings of disordered eating in general.

UK eating disorder charity, Beat, also recently announced that calls to their helpline have also experienced a rapid surge and are likely to reach 17,000 by March 2018 (up by 7000 calls last year). Caroline Price, Beat’s director of services, told the Guardian suggested social media as one of the potential reasons for the sharp rise in people seeking – and not receiving – help for eating disorders.

‘Eating disorders are complex and there is no one particular factor that means you get one, but we feel eating disorders are on rise partly because of the challenges of today’s society’, she explained. ’This includes social media and exam pressure. They don’t cause eating disorders; someone will be predisposed to be the type of personality who will develop an eating disorder ... Then the challenges of social media and pressure to go to university all those things can compound so someone really does suffer with it’.

The nature of eating disorders has undoubtedly changed just as the world that they exist in has. But it also feels like our understanding of them and the support that’s required for those who suffer them is blocked by the elaborate rebranding of what problematic eating habits look like. In the last couple of years, they’ve been able to be disguised as a clean eating hashtag, as a quest for the perfect Revenge Body, or as a fleeting commitment to ditching gluten/dairy/meat from diets without properly promoting how to maintain a nutritious balance.

There are certainly many things that will have contributed to the sharp rise in hospital admissions. No thanks to the NHS's long suffering budgets and limited funding for mental health specifically. But it's clear that the systems in place are inadequate at the moment. There have been instances where people have had to have to relocate in search of sufficient community support. And if there's an increase in people reaching the level of severity that requires hospital services, doctors, MPs and campaigners have warned that something going seriously wrong in the interim at outpatients facilities and treatment centres.

If we're not there already, we can't be far from breaking point. And while steps absolutely need to be taken at early stages to prevent people becoming so severely unwell that a hospital stint is required, part of that process needs to be an overarching acknowledgment of the role social media plays in shaping the eating disorder playing field, because those conversations don't seem to be happening nearly as much as they should.

We've seen the positive that has come from the public conversations around depression and anxiety, and how these conversations have contributed to moving anxiety in the context of our digital lives now into mainstream acceptance. Now it's about time we did the same for eating disorders. No doubt it's difficult territory, but that's half the problem.

Follow Jazmin on Instagram @JazKopotsha

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.