It was one of the few moments in public life that I have found myself in tears and challenged to maintain composure.
I sat and listened to the heart-wrenching stories of about a dozen participants at Australia’s first residential treatment facility for those suffering from eating disorders, named Wandi Nerida in Mooloolah, on the Sunshine Coast.
I heard from families at breaking point: about the health system that abandoned them, about young lives and those of their families hanging on by a thread.
Our failure as a country to address eating disorders was laid brutally bare with every tragic story.
It’s a story I unfortunately know all too well.
Mark and Gay Forbes are two brave parents in West Woombye who have devoted their lives to supporting families embarking on the eating disorder recovery journey. What started as a fortnightly coffee at their home has transformed countless lives.
Their story was born in despair, as they grappled with a system that failed their two daughters.
They contended with the revolving door in Queensland Health, in which patients are thrust into care, medically stabilised, and then cast aside without any specialised support.
Their heartbreaking story is one which is repeated across this country every day.
Intent on doing something about it, Mark and Gay Forbes launched endED to break the stigma, break the cycle, and provide crucial support to eating disorder sufferers and their families. In short, they provide hope to the hopeless.
With Butterfly Foundation, Mark and Gay Forbes partnered together to establish Wandi Nerida, made possible in part due to $7.3 million in Federal Coalition Government funding. Now, through their House of Hope, the team at endED are filling the gap in step-up, step-down services during pre and post-residential treatment. These are targeted and collaborative efforts to address an incredibly complex issue, and there are people alive today because of them.
One million Australians are said to be affected by eating disorders – 63 per cent of whom are women and girls. Anorexia nervosa is the most commonly known eating disorder and it is
Australia’s deadliest and perhaps most misunderstood psychiatric illness.
Eating disorders kill more Australians each year than those who are killed on our roads. That’s right, each year approximately 2000 Australians die due to medical complications arising from eating disorders. Eating disorders are insidious.
Yet despite the deadly seriousness of eating disorders, and despite what some medicos would have us believe, we don’t know what causes eating disorders or how best to treat them.
Services like those provided by the Butterfly Foundation and endED are essential, yet governments across the country are utterly failing this cohort of sufferers and their families.
Just stop and think about that for one moment. What would you do? Would you know how to spot the early telltale signs? What lengths would you go to if your daughter, sister, niece or even mother was slowly dying before your eyes from malnourishment, to the eyes of an outsider in an inexplicable act of protracted self-harm.
Many families spend years – sometimes decades – in search for the right treatment for their loved one. The cost, both financial and emotional, can be astronomical.
For some of our more well-off Australian families, they travel overseas looking for the often-touted elixir offered by private institutions, funded by second mortgages and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes with nothing to show at the end of it but more pain and suffering.
For those unable to fund such sojourns, they are left to battle ill-equipped and ill-trained state and territory health systems.
The Coalition’s then health minister Greg Hunt provided $70 million dollars in funding to the remaining States to build their own residential facility like the one we established on the Sunshine Coast.
To this day, Queensland remains the only State with such a facility, with no thanks to the Queensland Government which shamefully has not provided one red cent to the establishment or ongoing funding of Wandi Nerida. Not one red cent!
The cost of delivering these services is no small sum. But the cost of doing nothing is far greater. That’s why it’s vital that governments of all colours and jurisdictions do their bit to maintain operational funding for facilities like Wandi Nerida and endEd’s House of Hope.
And that’s why I’ve teamed up with Labor’s Susan Templeman MP and Independent Zoe Daniel MP to launch the Federal Parliamentary Friends of Eating Disorder Awareness because the way we deal with eating disorders and body image in this country needs to change, and it can only change if we put aside party politics and invest money into world’s best research and treatment.
Literally thousands of Australian lives depend on it.
If you’re experiencing an eating disorder or are concerned about someone, you can call the Butterfly National Helpline on 1800 ED HOPE (1800 33 4673).
Andrew Wallace is federal Member for Fisher and patron for endED.
Originally published on Courier Mail here: https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/opinion-harrowing-stories-of-eating-disorders-had-me-in-tears/news-story/f954e9dae838e69b62c286a64bf7acfb
