And this is what she said: “It is lovely to hear from you and of your interest in the new children’s community eating disorder service soon to be established in Leeds. It would be very useful to involve you in our local service developments as we recognise that the involvement of young people and their parents is integral to the success of any new service plans. I’ve copied in my colleague who is the clinician leading the service model developments; I think he would be ideal to talk through our Leeds plans with as he has had a key role in identifying the evidence-base treatment to include in the service model.” This is so exciting…Following my revelations, there has been some debate online in the …

I’m meeting with the psychiatrist guy from Leeds NHS a week on Wednesday and I can’t wait to find out what prompted Leeds to make the changes and move from multi-disciplinary CAMHS treatment for teenage eating disorders to a specialist eating disorders service for adolescents – and to adopt the evidence-based FBT (Family Based Therapy / Treatment) instead of the methods they were using when my son, Ben, was sick with anorexia.Just think… All those months when I was pushing for FBT-style treatment as I read up about it on the FEAST website and the Around the Dinner Table forum, but felt as if I was banging my head against a brick wall as Ben was whisked off for yet another individual therapy session with …

When my son Ben fell sick with anorexia, back in 2009 when he was 15, his school was amazingly supportive. By early 2010 he was finding it increasingly impossible to be in school. He couldn’t bear being anywhere near his peers, he was regularly breaking down in lessons and in the school dining hall, he was behaving irrationally and dangerously, he was exercising like mad at any opportunity and he was spending much of his time in the school medical centre rather than in lessons. And, of course, he was eating minimally throughout the day resulting in more and more weight loss.Ben’s dad and I figured that we could get Ben to eat more if he was at home being monitored through breakfast, snacks, lunch and the evening meal. …

I may have mentioned this already, but I’m speaking at the Scottish Eating Disorder Interest Group (SEDIG) Carers’ Conference 2016 at the end of next month (Saturday 27th February). The title of my talk will be “Eating disorders aren’t just a ‘girl thing'”; indeed the main thrust of the conference, I believe, will be about eating disorders in males and in particular eating disorders and anorexia in teenage boys.The angle I’m taking for my talk is that not only did it take some time for my husband Paul and I to recognise that our son was developing an eating disorder, because we had no idea that boys got eating disorders just like girls do, but that throughout the whole process – from GP referral through to CAMHS …

My sister pointed out this article about a friend of hers whose healthy, sporty son was sent home with a letter from school telling his mum that he was overweight. This especially incensed the boy’s mother because she herself had been a victim of anorexia as a young woman and understood more than most people about the dangers of the many things that can trigger an eating disorder.There’s a massive conflict at the moment between the drive to do something about the escalating levels of obesity in the UK and the danger that warnings/solutions could trigger the wrong sort of people to lose weight i.e. those predisposed to developing an eating disorder.The thing is, none of the measures which are being rolled out …

At last I’ve put all my blog posts (from 2011 when I began writing about eating disorders in boys up to the end of 2015) onto PDFs. So they’re much easier to read than clicking around Blogger which can be a nightmare. The latter two years – 2014 and 2015 – tend to be a bit more thin on the ground than the other years because, as you will know if you’ve been following my blog, I was struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder type symptoms which hit me at the end of 2013.So throughout 2014 and 2015 I took a bit of a break from writing about eating disorders in boys and my son’s recovery from anorexia while I concentrated on fixing the PTSD problem. It also meant putting on hold …

For better or for worse, I’m a terrible micromanager. And you wouldn’t believe the tweaking that’s gone into my script and PowerPoint presentation for the talk I’m doing at the Scottish Eating Disorder Interest Group (SEDIG) Carers’ Conference 2016 at the end of next month (Saturday 27th February). But I think I finally sorted it out. I think the main problem with my talk (which is called “Eating disorders aren’t just a ‘girl thing'”) is that I’ve got such a massive story that condensing it into just 25 or 30 minutes has been a bit tricky, to say the least! I’m not just talking about my son’s descent into and recovery from anorexia, I’m also talking about how he’s getting along now and also looking at what helped and what …

That’s what I’ll be asking the guy who’s in charge of rolling out FBT (Family Based Therapy) for adolescent eating disorder patients in Leeds when I meet with him on Wednesday. My home city of Leeds is claiming to be a ‘pioneer’ in the rolling out of FBT in England and so I can’t wait to hear what he has to say about plans for FBT being implemented in other parts of England. Already it’s being implemented in Scotland – and England was lagging behind. I’m not sure what the situation is in Wales or Northern Ireland.According to studies and trials, FBT as an outpatient treatment model for adolescents with eating disorders such as anorexia has a higher and more sustained success rate than other treatment models …