Mark Austin admits he told anorexic daughter "starve yourself to death"

The broadcaster Mark Austin has revealed how he struggled to understand his daughter’s anorexia and “failed utterly to grasp that she was seriously mentally ill”.

In a candid account, he admits he thought her “crass, insensitive, selfish and pathetic” and became so frustrated he once told her: “If you really want to starve yourself to death, just get on with it.”

But now the TV presenter hopes to break the taboo around potentially deadly eating disorders and is calling for improved mental health provision to deal with the crisis of more than 850,000 young sufferers, predominantly girls, in the UK.

Austin’s daughter Maddy, now 22, became ill in 2012, losing four stone and changing from a healthy and promising athlete to an “emaciated, ghostlike figure”.

He recalled: “I didn’t understand it at first. Cancer I understand … but this was my daughter wilfully destroying herself by not eating.”

Writing in the Sunday Times magazine, he described how Maddy would lie about how much she had eaten and “explode with rage” when challenged.

“She showered me with contempt. As a father you have to make a decision and I made the wrong one. I decided to go on the attack.”

He said: “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.”

The newsreader acknowledged that as a father he felt “excluded and hated” and found it hard to talk about issues of body image and weight control.

“I floundered and, in the process, ended up poisoning her against me further,” he said.

Austin described how things hit rock bottom for Maddy after a failed spell at a private inpatient unit on a regime of forced feeding. She resisted the treatment and threatened to kill herself. Maddy’s mother became so worried that when her daughter returned home she took time off work and slept on her bedroom floor so as to monitor her around the clock.

Maddy was eventually “saved” by a local NHS day-patient unit.

She recalled: “Eventually it was a local NHS nurse who really understood me and saw the Maddy without the demons. I was lucky, but mental health treatment should not be a lottery.”

Now her father is urging people to take the illness more seriously and is calling for “walk-in centres on the high street of every town and city in this country, manned by trained counsellors”.

He added: “As a country our response is bordering on the pathetic. It is a mental illness, but, almost uniquely, it is one that kills.”

One in 100 women aged between 15 and 30 are affected by anorexia and it is reckoned that one in five chronic anorexics will die as a result of the condition or because they take their own life.

The Beat youthline can help young people experiencing an eating disorder: 0345 634 7650. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here

Mark Austin admits he told anorexic daughter "starve yourself to death"