If you’re concerned about eating disorders or body image issues, whether you need support for yourself or someone you care about, you can call the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673.
Picture something that absolutely terrifies you. Now, imagine you’re forced to confront it multiple times a day – and nobody understands why it makes you feel distressed.
Dr Sarah Maguire, the director of the InsideOut Institute, says this is the reality many people with an eating disorder face at meal times. “You might as well be putting a plate of spiders in front of that person and asking them to eat it,” she says.
More than one million Australians are living with an eating disorder (such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, or binge eating) and anorexia is the nation’s deadliest mental illness. Dr Maguire teaches you the signs to look out for, the risks around social media, and how to help someone recover from a “completely curable” illness.
She also sheds light on the “vicious cycle” she says is holding back research and treatments.
And you’ll hear from 16-year-old Isla and her mother Sara, who reflect on what they’ve learned navigating Isla’s path to recovery. It’s essential listening for any parent.
The InsideOut Institute is at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, where Dr Maguire is also a professor.
Mark Scott 00:01
This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years. I pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Isla 00:27
I'm Isla, I'm 16. And I started battling with my eating disorder when, in year seven, when I was 12-13 years old. Having anorexia feels like a huge discomfort in your body, mentally and physically. It's like a constant battle within your mind. And whatever you do, you're never going to be good enough and it's very lonely thing. Because unless you've gone through it, no one really understands what it's like. It's, it's almost like you are your own enemy. And you're battling yourself every day waking up, choosing what you do, choosing what you eat, or don’t eat, choosing how to, like what you exercise. It's very unpleasant and it was like I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.
Mark Scott 01:31
That's Isla, a strong and determined young Australian who's recovering from anorexia nervosa. Fighting an eating disorder is tough. And that's something Sarah Maguire the Director of the InsideOut Institute knows all too well. Sarah will never forget her first patient, an indigenous girl, 16 years old, with severe anorexia. That's Australia's deadliest mental illness. And everyone thought this girl would die too. It was only a matter of time. Her family was desperate. Sarah, a young clinical psychologist, had no idea how to help. But somehow, magically, the girl clawed her way back to health. And Sarah still can't explain it. 1 million Australians are living with an eating disorder like anorexia, bulimia or binge eating. Many people struggle to get help. And research efforts are woefully underfunded. I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney. And this is The Solutionists where you meet the minds tackling our greatest challenges. Sarah, you didn't choose your first patient, she chose you. Tell me about that.
Sarah Maguire 02:56
I'll never forget it. I was not yet a psychologist. I'd graduated from honours in psychology and was a very humble research assistant. And I had a lovely clinical supervisor who said “Come on, you've got to get into clinical work.” So, I had just begun that journey. And I knew her from around the wards and around the hospital. And my memory is of just a tiny bit of her head poking past the frame of my door. And one of the softest knocks that one really would have missed, ordinarily, but I didn't miss it on that day. And her letting me know that she would like to receive therapy from me. And I had to explain to her that I wasn't get qualified, and it probably wasn't a great idea. I didn't even know if it was legal. And she just, sort of, quietly let me know that she had chosen me, you know, and didn't have much else to say. She was extremely unwell. She'd been on television several times, because her family was so worried. And she would flee treatment. She had had many, many, many hospital admissions. Sometimes, when treatment doesn't work, people need to be fed through tubes. Sometimes those tubes need to be inserted through the stomach, rather than through a nasogastric tube through the nose. She'd had just about every type of intervention. She'd resisted them. And when I say she, we probably shouldn't be saying she really the illness had resisted all of those attempts to treatment. But clearly, by the time she came to my office, she had other things in mind. She was, and remains a remarkable person, as are most people who recover from this illness because if you've had it for a long time and you're that unwell, it is sheer will, determination, creativity. It is an act of the person to get better and the rest of us who are around supporting them have, really, the privilege of watching the person do that, and of desperately trying to help. But it is an exercise in creativity and it's a shared exercise, and I learned that from her.
Mark Scott 04:59
Can we get a state of play today, what are we seeing about the prevalence of eating disorders now? And why is it so intractable?
Sarah Maguire 05:10
Yeah, intractable is an interesting word, isn't it? I mean, we use that word with eating disorders. But probably what that describes is that we're not getting enough people better. That might not be about the disease state and the pathology nearly as much as it is about our ability to respond, and our ability to respond early. Because, actually, eating disorders are curable if you receive the right treatment at the right time, and not for small numbers of people, they're totally curable for large numbers of people. So, I had a family call me very recently, and their child was about seven or eight, the mum didn't think there was a problem, the dad thought there was a problem. They would have described that child as a picky eater their whole life. But what was concerning the dad at this point was the child starting to not participate in social occasions because didn't want the food to come up. Mum gave examples of when the child was able to do that. So, it wasn't a black and white picture. And because I was able to refer them straight away to a clinic that had an availability, they did two or three sessions, and that child was back on track. They were an anxious kid. So, I think the sessions helped with the anxiety in general. And we'll see if that holds. But that might be all it takes to just right that developmental challenge at that point, so that they don't get into this entrenched pattern over time. To come back to your point about prevalence, yes, there is a growing body of data that suggests that the prevalence of eating disorders in general, of all of the categories of eating disorders, if you put them together, because there are a number of illnesses that make up that category, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, avoided and restrictive feeding of childhood, but it goes well into adulthood and lots of adults have it. There's other illnesses like muscle dysmorphia, and what they call the sort of unspecified eating disorders, which can be just as serious. And overall, that group is definitely increasing. There's a lot of data around that.
Mark Scott 07:11
I’ve heard you describe eating disorders as a hostage situation. What do you mean by that?
Sarah Maguire 07:17
I do think that eating disorders take the individual hostage, and they take the entire environment in which they are living hostage. Let's take a young person, for example, eating disorders affect all age groups, but they usually onset in youth. Some people illustrate that with a sort of Venn diagram, where one circle represents the illness, and the other circle represents the young person. And gradually over time, you can't distinguish one from the other. And obviously, the level of distress for that person around food and body permeates the entire family. There's lots of pressure on parents, on loved ones, on carers to change their behaviour, to change their feeding, to change the patterns in the house It can be very, very hard to receive the care that you need from the system. We're still training our health professionals; we're still training our systems to respond. So, you can be on a crusade, if you like, for a long time, trying to get the help that you need. And it can completely overtake the life of the system, including the young person.
Sara 08:22
My name is Sara, and I'm Isla's mom. And I'm very proud of her for the hard work she's put into recovery. And we've, we've done it together. You have to look at the eating disorder as a separate entity to your child. There was a fair bit of conflict involved, especially in the early days of her recovery when she just would not eat. And it's just hugely stressful. But we got through that by, and I believe this is quite a common strategy in people with eating disorders that they literally see the eating disorders as a separate person, almost, this that's controlling their brain that's bullying them. That's this kind of horrible presence within them. And I think that really helped us to separate the eating disorder was one thing, but was not Isla. Sometimes you had to face the fact that you were talking and battling with the eating disorder, you were not talking to logical, sweet, lovely Isla, who you know, wanted to be better. And I think once you mentally separate the two things, I, then it's a lot easier to deal with that sort of conflict.
Mark Scott 09:32
Sometimes thinking, talking with people with eating disorders, it almost just feels so counterintuitive. Not to want to eat or to be able to eat and I kind of wonder if there's a broader public perception that, that almost, those with eating disorders just need to kind of get a grip and do what sensible people know that they should do and that is eat. How difficult is it for us to really appreciate and understand what's going on with the person with an eating disorder?
Sarah Maguire 10:01
That sort of response is very, very common. And not just from the person on the street. I mean, health professionals say that to people when they come into the system, I used to train some of the nurses that would go and work on the wards with the most severely affected people, usually with anorexia nervosa. What we've got to realise is that the central problem is a terror around food. And certainly with those nurses that I was training, their job will be to refeed the person at every meal, to put the thing that that person fears the most in front of them. Six times a day is how many meals you will have in hospital, if you're being refed. I think we can all understand a spider phobia. I think that's a more human, broadly, human sort of fear. We're all scared of spiders to some extent. Most of us aren't scared of food. But you might as well be putting a plate of spiders in front of that person six times a day and asking them to eat it and then expecting them not to become upset, in fact, extremely upset, distressed, unable to do it. And I think it's worth thinking about it that way.
Isla 11:05
I wasn't consciously scared of food, I was more obsessed with it. Because I didn't realise I had a disease until a lot later on. I was obsessed with food. And I considered myself a foodie. And I would like read recipe books and look up things online and then make food for other people but not eat it. And I just thought that was me being healthy. But then once I went into recovery, and I was forced to eat the food, that's when I started feeling like I was given a plate of spiders. When I first went into hospital, I ate dinner, without any hesitation, because I didn't want anyone to think that there was something wrong with me. But then once I actually was given a meal plan, and I was told I had to eat this it was it was almost like I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. And I’d cry, and I'd argue and I'd yell and it was really difficult. I had to be convinced that I needed it. Because I didn't think it was that important for me to eat. Because that was my, what my eating disorder was telling me.
Mark Scott 12:22
I imagine this disease does not start with terror, but it ends up at a point of terror.
Sarah Maguire 12:28
Yeah. A typical journey might be that the person starts restricting foods, and then gets rewards from that really quickly, whether that reward be external, with them believing or seeing or -
Mark Scott 12:40
That they’re looking great or feeling healthy.
Sarah Maguire 12:42
- imagining that losing weight, or whether it might be an internal reward. Because for a lot of people restricting food leads to a decrease in emotion. And so if you're struggling with a whole lot of things that you don't know how to handle, and you engage in something that brings about relief in terms of drops in emotions, that's very, very immediate. Some of the people that I work with, we have a lot of lived experience researchers at InsideOut. And some of them talk about a high very early on, as soon as they started restricting, a high that they would compare to a drug high. Most of them don't take drugs. But they would compare it to that.
Isla 13:25
I think the biggest part of my eating disorder was having that sense of control. Because I had control over what I ate, I had control over what I put in my body. And I felt a high from that almost like a runner's high. And every time I was hungry, I felt like I had succeeded.
Mark Scott 13:49
Sarah, we know that eating disorders are Australia's deadliest mental illnesses. It receives a fraction of the medical research budget. Why that disconnect?
Sarah Maguire 14:04
Wouldn't we love to know? Look, I think when you're talking about any condition that's been really misunderstood and really stigmatised. You know, we think of discrimination and stigma at a personal level. But discrimination and stigma are through every system that we work in. In fact, they get really nicely structurally embedded, don't they, in, in our systems, and our healthcare systems and our funding systems are no different. So, I think when you're talking about something that's been really misunderstood and stigmatised, and for eating disorders, that stigma is, in some ways, particularly pernicious, because it blames the person. The misunderstanding is that you've brought this about, and that you can quickly fix it by just dealing with this obvious thing called food, you know, or body.
Mark Scott 14:51
In fact, I can see a real parallel, lung cancer kills far more people than any other cancer, but also it gets a fraction of the research money again, because I think there's a perception that, well if you've got lung cancer, you're probably a smoker. And so, in a funny sort of way, you put it on yourself, even though that same logic doesn't apply to, you know, heart disease or a range of other diseases that can also be driven or affected by decisions that are taken by the patient. Seems that lung cancer and eating disorders have really been kind of singled out for this in a punitive treatment by research funders.
Sarah Maguire 15:30
Yeah. And look, it's, it's a really vicious cycle as well, because, you know, yes, some of the research that we published last year, we did a full portfolio analysis, over 13 years of the research funding in what the fund has classed as this sort of group of mental illnesses. And eating disorders was the lowest by a significant margin. So, the equivalent of $2 per person in, who has the illness invested in research, whereas schizophrenia was like $170 per person, and depression $20. Those rates get bandied around, but it's actually the absolute dollars that matter as well. So that was $28 million invested over 13 years into eating disorders research, that's like $2 million a year. You can barely do any research project for $2 million, you'd be lucky to pay one salary from that amount of money with all the rest of the research costs. Whereas in depression, it was $266 million over that 13-year period. So, that is $266 million worth of activity of people, of careers, of universities building centres, of institutes building. So, the downstream effects of that low-dollar funding go on for decades. So, eating disorders, and lung cancer can't build the systems that are more likely to attract the money.
Mark Scott 16:48
And do you think we're seeing the consequence of that, you know, with lack of therapeutic breakthroughs in treatment of eating disorders, a correlation between the lack of research funding and lack of new insights to drive improved outcomes?
Sarah Maguire 17:01
Without a doubt, without a doubt. I mean, the only way we're going to get breakthroughs, really, is through vigorous, extensive, consistent research activity. And that doesn't mean necessarily all ivory tower research, a lot of that research should be happening at the bedside at the clinic. That all costs money too, and that all takes time.
Mark Scott 17:22
So, what don't we know? What do you need funding for to gain insight to improve outcomes?
Sarah Maguire 17:28
What do we know about eating disorders? We know that they have a biological component. But we also know that all the effective treatments to date have been largely psychological in nature. So, we know that we need to have treatments probably, that combine those two things together. And we have almost none of that research going on. That would be a really great place to start. But of course, when you've got an environment where very few dollars go into research, treatment is a bit sexier than deep understanding. We don't really understand what eating disorders are, we don't understand the biological drivers, the maintainers, which systems are involved. When you have breakthroughs in illnesses, you usually have it because that understanding has come first. So, we desperately need to invest in what we call basic science as well. So, looking at the brain in depth, looking at the organs of the body in depth, looking at things like the microbiome, our hormone systems, and that very, very complex interplay that you get in illnesses like this that have a genetic component, but are not just genetic.
Mark Scott 18:34
Anyone can be affected by an eating disorder, but some groups are more vulnerable than others. What does your research tell you about that, and particularly around LGBTI community?
Sarah Maguire 18:45
Eating disorders don't discriminate, in a way, they can happen to absolutely anybody at any point in the lifespan. Retirement, age onset of eating disorders is a thing it happens. And from certainly from the age of six, we're diagnosing them. What we're starting to find out is that people who are non-binary, or who are genderqueer, may be at an even higher risk of eating disorders. That's what the data would suggest.
Mark Scott 19:11
And any suggestions as to why that might be the case?
Sarah Maguire 19:14
Eating disorders, in my view, go to the heart of identity. Some people refer to an eating disorder as becoming a false self. And if we think about what our LGBTQI+ community has to go through, in terms of identity, I don't think it's difficult to understand where there might be a higher risk there.
Mark Scott 19:37
I think some educators would suggest there can be a contagion effect around eating disorders, that all of a sudden a group of friends, a year group, all of a sudden, look at all those children dealing with eating disorders, explain where that comes into play.
Sarah Maguire 19:56
If we think about any illness that has a genetic component, it's not 100% of the story. You'll get that genetic vulnerability or that biological vulnerability, if you like. And then what's the difference between those that end up with the illness and those that don't? And we know, for forever that that difference is called the environment. And that's what I've observed. I think it is. It is an interaction between the biological vulnerabilities that the person carries, what happens in their immediate environment, in their rearing, in their close peer groups, in their exposure to trauma, those sort of things. But there is another environment that's around that. And that is our social environment. And we don't really have the data to prove that. But it would be highly unlikely that it wasn't demonstrated that that is part of that intereaction of your biology and your environment that leads to the expression of those genes - epigenetics, if you like.
Mark Scott 21:04
When you were young, you did ballet, and I think you've reflected that you can look back on your friends and that group who were doing ballet with you, and you could see now that numbers of them were struggling with eating disorders, what signs can you look back and see?
Sarah Maguire 21:18
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I wasn't regarded as prima ballerina potential. So, I got to do it as pure enjoyment and I love it to this day. But there were a number of, in particular females, but there were some males in our school who were on that prima ballerina ballet dancer track. And they certainly were given a different environmental experience within that setting. And I just remember them being called off for conversations, I remember their relationship with food changing, I remember their mood, changing, their relationship with their body changing. I remember lots more visits to the bathroom. I just, I really just remember the sort of light going out actually, in some of those people and one of them died a couple of years ago, she was my dear friend. She didn't die in the peak. We've just got some data that's letting us know that the 30s that really are the peak period for death from something like anorexia nervosa. She made it into her 40s. But she died way too young. And I remember watching her, and she had such a bright light. And I remember watching it slowly, slowly go out.
Isla 22:29
In my recovery, my main motivator, was actually getting back to sport and getting back to rugby. Because rugby is like, it's a big part of me. And it's like, basically my whole personality. So, that's what really drove me to get better. I think, especially rugby being such a positive confidence booster for me, because you see the professional rugby players, and they are not small girls, they are not skinny thing girls. They are built, and they are muscular, and they have weight on them. And it's just those are the girls who are the most successful. And it's just amazing to me, like that's why I love rugby so much because it for any body type you can play. If your back, you can be smaller and quicker. But for forwards, it's, especially for women, it's the dominant, strong, powerful girls who really make an impact. And I love smashing like people, like, I love, I love like getting in and wrestling with people because that's what I did growing up with my brothers.
Mark Scott 23:36
Are you still worried when you look at stories that are emerging, particularly say around competitive sport, there have been stories about the treatment of elite swimmers? How do we create an environment where people can perform at their best but perform at their best in a healthy way?
Sarah Maguire 23:50
Well, I think the mythology is alive and kicking in elite sports, as well. We're governed by mythology a bit when it comes to the relationship with food, and the relationship with body. We've got all these wacky ideas out there about what health is. And I really hope that in the next couple of decades, as a society and a culture, we start to confront that mythology, the idea that dieting is somehow always virtuous, it's not or that it's synonymous with health. Jana Pittman, who's one of our ambassadors at InsideOut tells a really interesting story about her journey as an elite athlete. And she was training and she was starting to do extremely well. And I think it goes that she won the national championships. And she's looked back over time and sort of mapped this timeline. And that was sort of her first peak in terms of her sport performance. It was also, she said, one of the points where she was the healthiest, but there was a mythology active at that time that is still very present in a lot of our elite sports, not just running, but ballet, jockeys, you name it, that your best performance is synonymous with thinness and so, pressure was brought to bear on her after that point. And she went further and further into an eating disorder. And actually, when she tracks her performance, it is exactly at its worst, when the eating disorder was at its peak. And it was exactly at its best when she was feeding her body, and loving her body and allowing it to be a body in the world.
Isla 25:25
Nutrition and sport have been a big link for me, because I now understand how important it is to fuel my body, not just with the right things, but with enough. Because I play a lot of rugby, and I do really high levels of rugby. And then we had a nutritionist, ex-professional Wallaroo, who's on the Australian Rugby women's team and she came to talk to one of my rugby teams. And I actually had a conversation with her and she talked about how when she was training really hard, she was feeling really, like, lightheaded and she was shaky after workouts and during the day, and I realised that's what was happening to me. So, then I realised that it's not just about what you eat, but I need to eat, I actually need to eat a lot for all the sport that I'm doing.
Mark Scott 26:16
As we've looked at increasing levels of mental illness related to eating disorders, it's also come at a time of proliferation of mobile devices, social media, young people spending so much time online, and there are some very disturbing and harmful environments out there. How do we sink through ways of dealing with that? And how do we equip parents to deal with that?
Sarah Maguire 26:41
Yes, well, certainly the rise of the iPhone, and all of the apps that go along with it tracks rather nicely alongside a graph of rising mental health concerns in young people. I'm very reluctant to go causal, because I'm a scientist, until I've seen the smoking gun. But we do know that limiting screen time and parents being really active on that is helpful for so many health issues. I know how hard it is, I have two young, teenage children and it is the constant battle of my parenting. I have never found a strategy to deal with social media that I haven't had to revise every six months. And I just am committed to doing that because I know the data around the benefits and I know the benefits. We've got a lot of social comparisons built-in to that relationship with technology. There's a very old phrase in psychotherapy, which is that comparisons are the thief of joy. And they are highly associated with poorer mental health in our young people in all of us, we know it makes you feel worse.
Isla 27:49
I only just got a phone when I was 13, when I was in year seven, and I got the social media like I got Tik Tok, I got Instagram, Snapchat. And especially Tik Tok because the algorithm like alters it in order to see what you're watching, all of mine was obsessive foodstuff or like thin imagery, or, like what I eat in a day, and it was all just about comparison. And it was ‘do these exercises to get like a slim waist’, ‘get rid of your muffin top’, ‘do this workout’, that kind of thing. It was also people posting on social media about them having eating disorders, and actually giving me ideas on what I could do to be a better anorexic. So, it was it was a really negative thing for me.
Mark Scott 28:46
Add to that, that young people are comparing themselves not just to classmates, but to an idealised version of people from all around the world.
Sarah Maguire 28:55
And of course, it's a manipulated version of reality. It's not just an idealised version of reality. And then, of course, the algorithms are being programmed for maximum eyeball contact. And so, we've got quite a bit of data coming out of Melbourne, Scott Griffiths lab at the moment, around just the levels of that like 200-300 times the eating disorder related content being sent to a person that the machine identifies as being vulnerable to that. So, what is the answer? I'm involved in a really great committee that Zoe Daniels, the MP has put together at the moment, and Meta is there, Facebook, Instagram, they've come to the table. And some of the best ideas are coming from the young people at that table. So, I think we need to engage young people in the solution. And there are things being talked about, like shields, digital shields that you can choose to engage on your device that will come across and that will control the algorithms. The scientists and experts have been arguing that it shouldn't be up to the person just to enact the shield that we've got to talk about a two-way solution where Meta and the other companies that are profiting from this, in the extreme, are actively coming up with technical fixes to minimise this. And at the same time, we're putting power in the hands of families and young people to prevent the most harmful effects of devices.
Mark Scott 30:18
What should parents be looking for?
Sarah Maguire 30:20
I think parents need to know that eating disorders very rarely occur in isolation, that usually, they are a sign that your person is in psychological trouble. So, if they're anxious, if they're withdrawing socially, if they're depressed, especially if they're in that risk age group of adolescence, young adulthood, then consider that maybe they may be resorting to food and body as one of the ways to deal with that.
Sara 30:48
A big part of Isla’s eating disorder was her compulsive exercise. And there's a lot of mixed messages around that. She was, you know, to exercise is healthy. But she was very compulsive and exercising several times a day. And there's a lot of, again, media and even at school, they're constantly told about exercising, because the worry is that teenagers stop exercising, they spend too much time on video games and things like that. But Isla was exercising to the point of exhaustion and not fuelling herself. So, that was actually a huge part of her illness.
Sarah Maguire 31:22
And in an ideal world, we want freedom around food, and freedom around body and that comes through valuing your body and loving your body. And knowing that it's an instrument to move in the world, to take you on adventures, to cuddle your friends, to cradle your child later on. It's not a thing to be judged, and controlled, and punished. So, I suppose broadly, look for signs that your child is judgmental about their body, certainly look for signs that they are fearful around food. If you are on that trajectory of fear around food, that's core construct, in eating disorders, act, don't wait another minute. Let's do the things that parents are really good at doing. Let's love our children. And let's rear them to love themselves. So, from the very earliest stages, be very mindful of how you talk about your body, and how you use your body in the household. I was very mindful when I had children to never speak negatively about my body in front of them. I certainly don't wake up jumping, you know, from the rooftop every morning. When it comes to my physical appearance, I've worked hard to like myself, but I have worked very hard to never make a comment about that in front of my children. I've tried to expose them to the idea that all foods are good foods, that hierarchy about good and bad is the beginning of fear. And ultimately, fear can become terror. So, all foods are good foods, it's just about the frequency.
Sara 32:50
It was very hard, but I knew that she was not well, for a long time before we managed to get her help. Because like a lot of people with an eating disorder, she covered it very well. She was quite, and the eating disorder not Isla, was quite deceitful in the way that she would eat full dinners. And when I was there she would eat, it was when I wasn't there that she wouldn't eat. And she did eventually come to me and we went to see a very good GP that we know, who helped her, but I knew she was in trouble by then. So, Isla ended up getting an EKG and – is that the right term? That’s the right term isn’t it? - for her heart, she got the heart test, and her heart rate was very, very slow. They were worried about her heart, they were actually worried that she's gonna go into cardiac arrest, which was a massive shock for her and for me, for everyone. And she was admitted to hospital that day. And that sort of intense intervention that she got at that particular time, I think is the thing that aided her recovery the most. I feel like, perhaps, I felt very guilty for not seeking help for her earlier and forcing that help upon her. But in the same way, I feel like if we'd had gone earlier, she wouldn't have got the intense help and the support that she actually ended up with that allowed her to recover. So, it's a bit of a double edged sword that, that one.
Mark Scott 34:13
One of the things I found hard is when you've been around someone who clearly is suffering from an eating disorder, it's highly visible, how to engage with that person, you know, how friends and family and others in a broader kind of network of support best engage?
Sarah Maguire 34:30
Yeah, look, I think that's one of the hardest things and I just have to I have to in solidarity with the families and the siblings and the carers and the friends that are really trying to help, I have to, you know, explain how difficult that is. And I would love to tell you that there was one thing that you could say that would be right. I think if you are at the point where you're really worried about someone, and you're noticing probably it's really quite serious and know that they are struggling and know that it is at this point and mental illness so they are in mental anguish. Even if they weren't having mood issues like depression prior to the onset, they probably do by now. So, go gently. I suppose if you can encourage them, at least to the notion that there is help out there, I would say definitely don't give up. Keep at it. So, don't expect to be met with a positive response. But don't confuse that with doing the wrong thing. And call us, call Butterfly Foundation, call some of the experts who can assess your sort of individual situation and give you some tips about what might be receptive to the person that you're trying to help.
Mark Scott 35:43
This is The Solutionists and I'm Mark Scott, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney. Sarah McGuire is the Director of the InsideOut Institute for Eating Disorders. And a warm thank you to Isla and her mother Sara, for sharing their experiences.
Sara 36:03
Listening to Isla, I think I'm just incredibly proud of her. But it also makes me reflect on just how far we've come. It's been three-and-a-half years since Isla went to hospital with anorexia. And she's come so far, but it's just, it's been such a massive journey. I'm very proud of her. But it's also, it's kind of brought a tear to my eye listening to it because it has been terrible thing. It's a terrible, terrible thing. And it was very hard. I'm so happy that she has recovered. But yeah, it's been a challenging time.
Mark Scott 36:37
If listening to this podcast has raised any issues for you, the Butterfly Foundation offers free support in Australia, you can call them on 1800 334 673.
Isla 36:57
Hopefully playing rugby for Australia in 10 years, that's what I see myself.
Sara 37:04
Or Scotland?
Isla 37:05
Not Scotland. I also would like to go to uni. I'd either like to do nutrition and dietetics, because I want to express that in a positive way now, and hopefully help other people who had similar experiences to me, or like try and change the toxic diet culture of nutrition and like be an advocate for anti-diet nutrition and help. Or my other option would be psychology, which again, I would like to help other people.
Mark Scott 37:41
We all know that quality sleep is a great way to support your mental health, it can reduce the risk of anxiety, it can reduce the risk of depression. But in this crazy world we're living in sleep can feel like a luxury. I really enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Carmel Harrington. She told me that we're in the grip of a public health crisis, because we're battling screens and alerts right when we should be nodding off.
Dr. Carmel Harrington 38:07
Certainly, I think it's time for an education campaign. I mean, there's an economic burden, but there's a huge health burden and there's a personal burden. So, now is a good time for people to wake up to the importance of sleep.
Mark Scott 38:18
So, get ready to master the art of a good night's sleep and listen to my conversation with Dr. Carmel Harrington. The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. This episode was recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences media room. And our thanks to the technical staff here.
The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
This episode was produced by Monique Ross with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Thanks to the technical staff at the at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room.
This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.