Loading ...When your child breaks an arm or a leg, you know where to go. You know that when you go there, someone will help you. You go to the emergency department and the nurse sees you, the doctor comes, you have an x-ray, and either you are given a cast, or worst luck, you need surgery, but you get help.
[…] If you have an eating disorder, it is not like that. You do not know where to go. Your parents do not know where to go for help. Lots of doctors and nurses do not know what to do for you. Many of them blame you for being sick. But you are sick, really sick.
Trying to get help is a frustrating, lonely journey. Most people make many, many calls in an effort to get help. When you finally find something that looks hopeful, you get on a ten month waiting list… it is like showing up in emergency with a broken bone and being told, yes, it is really broken, so try and do what you can with it and we will see you in ten months.
[…] That seems a ludicrous example, no one would ever do that, nor should they. However, this is what happens with mental illness all the time, and somehow it is acceptable.
At age 11, my daughter’s treatment and ours as a family would have been very different if she had cancer rather than an eating disorder. […] The experience of having a child with a mental illness has all of the fear, doubt, searching for answers, trying to cope, stress, and emotional trauma as having a very physically ill child, without any of the supports that a serious physical illness receives.
You feel very much alone, and left alone. —Heather Dowling
