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Pro-Ana
| Date: |
17 August 2003 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Victoria Cullinan
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Michelle: 'It's almost like you go into this spaced out feeling. And then there is just nothing else you can do for yourself except eat and eat and eat and eat. Just anything that is readily available.'
Michelle is 18 years old. For the past 5 years she has suffered from the eating disorder bulimia. Whenever she gets upset Michelle goes on a binge.
Michelle: 'I open the fridge, I open cupboards and I get what I need and then I run off to wherever I eat my food and I eat it.'
Michelle is a typical bulimic. When she is in this state she loses control of herself completely.
Michelle: 'For me I eat until I am completely full. I start to get nauseous or the food comes back up all by itself. And you don't think about it until you look around you and you see all these empty packets and then it is like this massive feeling of shame hits you.'
Her shame intensifies when she realises that she's grabbed food out of the freezer and gnawed her way through frozen bread and pizza. In her feeding frenzy she also has found herself foraging for scraps of discarded food in the dustbin.
Michelle: 'And that is just the worst feeling. And so you go and you purge it.'
As she emerges from this trance-like state she feels incredible self-loathing. Disgusted, she rushes to the toilet and sticks her fingers down her throat to make herself vomit.
Les: 'Once you've done this how do you feel?'
Michelle: 'Much better, the most prominent thing for me is that I can face the day again. I can go back out there and put my mask back on for the world and be ok.'
But she is not OK. She is very ill and she could die. She may not look thin, but years of bingeing and purging have taken their toll on Michelle's body. In its desperation for nutrition, the body begins to cannibalise itself, which eventually results in organ failure. Last year Michelle became so ill she had to be hospitalised. Incredibly, this was the first time her family realised she was bulimic.
Bulimia became widely known in the 1980's and given a high profile by the late Princess Diana. It affects millions of people. 90 percent of them are women. But despite the statistics it remains a secret affliction that is difficult to detect.
Joy Raine (Therapist): 'I've known people who have been ill for seven years and their families haven't had a clue.'
Joy Raine is a therapist who specialises in treating people with eating disorders.
Joy: 'Very often the bingeing is silent and very private. So they tend to do this when nobody is watching.'
They become more and more isolated from family and friends in order to hide their secret.
But Michelle has found a new circle of friends - on the Internet. A horrifying new trend is the dozens of websites that glorify eating disorders. Called Pro-Ana and Pro-Mia, they glamorise Anorexia and Bulimia and promote it as a lifestyle choice. With names like Starving for Perfection, Rexia World and Ana By Choice, they attract thousands of sufferers like Michelle, every day.
Michelle: 'I can describe it as my second home. If I go on there and speak to the girls or if post something about my day that is what I am completely drawn to.'
Like anything on the web the pro-ana sites are difficult to control. Organisations have tried to shut them down but they re-emerge due to popular demand.
They echo a defiant attitude about the right to choose to have an eating disorder and refer to anyone who tries to stop the websites as 'haters'.
Michelle: 'I think it's unfair of people, especially those who don't understand, to come in and tell us how we should live. And telling us how sick we are and that kind of thing and if you don't understand what's the point of you interfering. You will just make us angrier. Make us feel worse and the more you do it, the more we are going to fight back and we have every right to be doing what we're doing.'
Joy: 'Often on the sites you will see things like them wanting to be seen and heard and understood and maybe they do get some of that. But what it also does is keeps them absolutely stuck. It doesn't provide any room for anything nourishing to come in at all.'
Ana is my angel and my devil. She makes me feel as light as a feather. She is there when I hurt. She comforts me when I am down. It's a lifestyle, it's my choice.
The websites are a shocking reflection of the inner torment that people like Michelle feel. She spends hours surfing the websites and chat rooms, sharing her darkest thoughts with the so- called 'weborexic' community and, 'Ana'.
The websites have personalised the eating disorder by calling it Ana. Ana is their powerful ally against a hostile and uncaring world.
Michelle: 'We all say Ana is our friend. And it can be your friend or your enemy. Basically it is just this formation in your mind who is just utter perfection and totally in control of just everything.'
Dear Ana, I offer you my heart my soul and my bodily functions. I give you all my earthly possessions. I seek your wisdom and your faith and your featherweight. I will worship you and pledge to be your faithful servant, until death.
Anorexics and bulimics are obsessed with food. They spend an inordinate amount of time shopping for it, cooking it or thinking about it. And yet their relationship with food is one of fear and loathing.
Michelle: 'I hate food but it's a permanent thought in my mind. I don't actually get away from the thoughts of food.'
Alex Wallis: 'If I watch her I can see she is looking at it all the time. She is thinking, 'Can I eat this now, is it appropriate for me to do that.' You can see the thoughts going through her head all the time about food. And making sure that she is in close proximity to food all the time.'
Alex Wallis is talking about her sister Sharon, who has been in the grip of an eating disorder since matric. Sharon is now 36 and has reached such an acute stage that she doesn't even try to hide her bizarre behaviour.
Alex: 'We ended up going to this restaurant and everybody ate a normal amount of food and she ended up eating everybody's leftovers at the table. There must have been about ten people sitting at the table. She was saying: 'Let me taste that', and then she would finish it. Without any shame I just realised how the need to binge for her was so much bigger than the fear of humiliating herself in front of strangers.'
Les: 'How did people react to this?'
Alex: 'No-one says anything. Nobody says, 'You are eating so much, but you are so thin. Where do you put it?' No one says anything. Everyone is just, 'Ja, of course you can have some. Eat.' '
But being thin is every bulimics ultimate goal, and they can go to the websites for 'thinspiration'. They have picture galleries with photographs of ultra-thin celebrities in glamorous poses.
Then there are the 'Bone Pictures', these have been altered to make the models look as emaciated as possible. But some are not altered. These are real people who look like famine victims. But in the minds of anorexics they represent the ideal. These are called trigger pics, and they are used to spur anorexics on in their quest for their idea of perfection.
Michelle: 'It does get scary sometimes but for the most part, it's not. For the most part I envy them for where they are. I want to be ultra-super-thin, that is my goal.'
Joy: 'They feel and see fat despite massive weight loss and it becomes almost delusional and you cannot convince them otherwise.'
Eating disorders have one of the highest death rates of any mental illness. At least ten percent of all sufferers will die.
Alex: 'I got a phone call once saying that she was in hospital and my heart literally jumped into my stomach. I mean I dropped.'
Alex thought that her sister had died, only to hear that she had had an accident.
Alex: 'She'd fallen on some ice and she had fallen on her bum and she had cracked her pelvis in two places.'
At 36 Sharon has the bone density of someone twice her age. Apart from her skeletal appearance, like many bulimics, she has calluses on her knuckles from sticking her fingers down her throat.
Alex: 'She can drink a cup of boiling hot coffee like it is cool-drink. She has no feeling in her throat. She has had all of front teeth capped which are I am told the stomach acid just destroys. I don't think she has periods any more. She will probably never fall pregnant. You can see every vein through her skin. It is so papery thin.'
Michelle: 'We always say friends are pure you can see everything fighting in them. Everything about control.'
Most bulimics and anorexics know exactly how many calories they are eating, and are overwhelmed by a sense of failure when they eat too much. The websites offer tips on how to starve and binge, and how to conceal this from family and friends.
Michelle: 'There's million of different ways that you can do this. It is like using a cup when you are eating if you have to eat with your family and spitting things into the cup and pretending you are drinking and that kind of thing. I would never have thought to have done that.'
Young girls who develop eating disorders are often highly intelligent achievers, and very competitive. It usually begins at puberty, just when teenagers are becoming conscious of their appearance and begin to diet, some can't stop.
Joy: 'Very often these people have a very, very poor sense of themselves. And in the very severe cases when you go below the facade of this perfection you will find that these people feel absolutely impotent. They feel ineffectual and they have no self-esteem'.
Joy believes that the number of sufferers is increasing, she has seen patients as young as eight years old. It is a disorder that mainly affects middle to upper income families.
Joy: 'Often these families seem to be model families. They are high achievers and they just seem to have it all and they get totally non-plussed when their child gets ill.'
And siblings like Alex find it very hard to understand why they are doing this to themselves.
Alex: 'It's very painful for me because she is choosing to loose her life and its not like she or maybe it is - I don't know. Its not like she has a terminal illness but she is choosing to have this illness.'
But it is not a choice; it is a borderline personality disorder and is extremely difficult to treat. Most cases require years of therapy with support from the family.
Joy: 'And a key thing and this goes for bulimia as well, is that they don't manage conflict very well. And these families tend to avoid conflict and avoid expressing feelings.'
One place Michelle feels that she can express her feelings is her secret scrapbook. In here she pastes pictures and writings that she's collected from the websites. Under pseudo-religious headings like the Thin Commandments and the Ana Creed, she finds the tenets that sustain her belief in her chosen path. They reinforce and encourage her feelings of self-loathing and shame.
Michelle's own drawings are a graphic depiction of her inner world. A small girl is trapped inside a fat, unhappy person. Tears stream down a face that has no mouth, and the wrists appear to be slashed.
Les: 'Do you think about death?'
Michelle: 'Ja, a lot.'
Les: 'In what way?'
Michelle: 'In terms of the eating disorder. How far am I going to take this? Am I going to die from this? And in terms of the viewing my life whether it really is worth being alive in the end.'
Websites like the Pro-Ana Suicide Society unashamedly make death a reasonable option for these young teenagers. Alex's sister has gone overseas and refuses to get treatment or acknowledge her potentially fatal condition. Until she decides to seek help there is little her family can do.
Alex: 'I've had to put her somewhere so that I don't have to have this constant thinking about whether today is the day I get the phone call.'
On the positive side there is a website called Something Fishy that helps sufferers to recover from their eating disorders, offering advice and allowing them to express themselves. It also commemorates the thousands of people who have died from this illness, hoping to shock sufferers into seeking help. Michelle does visit this site, but she knows it will take more than this to change her mind.
Les: 'What could help you stop this?'
Michelle: 'Starting to accept myself as a person and trying to accept my body. And making a decision to fully go into recovery and to fight. Nobody can force me.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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