Submitted to the 18-25 Project

My experience of “treatment” over the last 26 years have been positive. Life on psychiatric wards is demeaning and often life threatening for people with Anorexia.

Recently I removed myself, from the treatment/recovery/ failure/ treatment roundabout. I was disillusioned and had seen no improvements in understanding or treating Anorexia since my first admission in 1983.

I believe now that it’s time for empathy, unconditional love and compassion to replace psychiatric drugs/ punishment/ humiliation and imprisonment. All human beings have the same basic needs for love recognition, personal empowerment and self determination, the very needs that treatment of anorexia at best ignores and as worst withholds as punishments.

When we are “treated” against their will, they learn to adjust to being bullied. If we want to strengthen and empower people forcing help on them is contradictory- all that happens is that people are beaten into psychological submission by the process.

If only professionals could focus on finding the inherent worth of an individual.

This is more often achieved by those who acknowledge their own humanness and inadequacies blowing apart the myth or the “expert healer” There is no such thing! No external authority will ever bring about internal order!!

Life is a battle ground for everyone. Therapists, Psychiatrists, nurses, have their own secret demons. Allowing themselves to be seen as human and meeting people on a more equal footing would be much more effective then attempting to reach the core of a person’s soul from a safe distance.

This doesn’t mean nothing should happen but rather a balance between casual friendship and alienated professionalism! Try harder- be a bit more creative and pay attention!!

Resistance by professionals to change leads to therapeutic feuds, excuses and justification in an attempt to discredit any other “truth”

The truth is rarely told

“Lying is done with words and also with silence!” (Adrenne Rich)

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Sent to Nikki by a special person she met when she was working as an art therapist

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