Experiences of eating disorders: "I"ve been to many dark places"

Anonymous, 22
The first time I was depressed, I was 12 and I didn’t know I was ill. I didn’t even know what depression was. After a family feud and several years of being a victim of bullying, I didn’t want to live any more. I remember standing on my balcony, hands on the railing, and thinking: “Should I jump?” I thought that I was a coward, because I was afraid of dying more than I hated living. I began to self-harm, and my mental illness had the sting of a pair of scissors cutting into my skin.

I was 16 when I decided to lose weight, so the boys and the girls wouldn’t laugh any more, and perhaps, just perhaps, someone, one day, would even desire to touch me. Three years later, I was sitting on the toilet bleeding because I had taken too many laxatives, and my mental illness was as red as blood.

At 19, I gained all the weight back and along with it came anxiety and depression and the sense of failure. I had moved in London, away from my family, to study and build a new life. So why wasn’t I happy? Why had the balcony turned into a tube platform and I was wondering again: “Should I jump?”

I lost the weight again at 21, and by 22 things were OK (in a precarious, risky balance). I decided that I needed help before things got worse again. Now, once a week, I meet with a therapist, thanks to the NHS, and she asks me how my week was, and I am as honest as I can be.

I was as pretty

As a flower

Yours to pick

And then left to wither

Now

I want to be as free as the wind

As tall as a mountain

As fierce as a lion

And beautiful

Like the stars

That keep shining

After they’re long gone.

Jessica Secmezsoy-Urquhart, 23, Hamilton, Scotland, master’s student

Jessica Secmezsoy-Urquhart: ‘I will always have multiple conflicting sides to myself but I’ve found ways to bring them together more now.’ Photograph: Jessica Secmezsoy-Urquhart

This photo is called Alone Together, and represents the duality of my identity. I’m a recovered sufferer of an eating disorder, an abuse survivor and I was hospitalised twice before the age of 15 with depression caused by the social effects of Asperger syndrome. I have everything from attention deficit disorder to anxiety and I’m chronically ill with a connective tissue disease. And yet I’m mentally better than I’ve ever been and have found my place at university, but to get there I’ve been to many dark places.

I had two selves, like in this image – the real one that was disgusting, pathetic and deserved to be dead and mistreated, and one that others saw that was normal and good. I will always have multiple conflicting sides to myself, but I’ve found ways to bring them together more now. Recovery is possible. I’m proof.

Anonymous, 29
I have suffered with anorexia nervosa since I was 12 and have been in and out of several inpatient units. As an adult, having been a service user for the past seven years, I have seen a rapid decline in the quality of services available, not just for eating disorders, but across the whole of mental health.

NHS cuts have led to decreased beds being available for desperately ill patients, resulting in more strain on community services. Working hours and staff shortages have also put a huge strain on nurses in this field, resulting in reduced quality of patient care.

Treatment in all areas of the NHS, but particularly mental health, is being severely compromised. I am currently a patient at a hospital in south London, on the eating disorders unit. Staff shortages, lack of trained nurses and increasing demands on the few nurses on the ward, are seriously jeopardising patient care. In some cases patients are being left to deteriorate to such extremes that they have required nasogastric feeding to save their lives.

Suz Hemming, Aylesbury

Suz Hemming: ‘It took six years of my life just to get past the shape and size of the thing I have that keeps me alive – my body.’ Photograph: Suz Hemming

This photo is representative of my battle with mental illness, which I have lived with from a young age. I have borderline personality disorder, that frequently leaves me with this overwhelming sense of identity diffusion and a profound confusion and disparity between my image and my body; my thoughts and who I am. This photo creates a way of capturing who I might be in the one moment, because my rapid mood fluctuations and unstable sense of self often leave me with this idea of my life as a string of photos, disconnected from one another, with no narrative or person a its core. Its black-and-white presentation symbolises the black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking style that is the cornerstone of my illness. It’s what keeps me stuck, what keeps me searching in the mirror for an answer to the question: “Can I be just one person, a whole, not fractured with flashbacks from my past?”

Also, being in stable recovery from anorexia, the photo asks what is it in a piece of glass that has so much power? Not just over me but over you too. It took six years of my life just to get past the shape and size of the thing I have that keeps me alive – my body. This photo asks me who and what is real. Is it me? Is it her? Is it her image? Or mine? And whether any of those things can be the same as each other – each a part of a bigger part, of a much bigger picture of my journey towards living a life in a “working recovery” from acute mental illness.

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.

Experiences of eating disorders: "I"ve been to many dark places"