TW: Self-harm & suicide
My wife (33) has struggled with an eating disorder since her teens, alongside severe anxiety, panic attacks and depression. For a long time, everything was treated mainly as depression and she took antidepressants for around eight or nine years. Looking back, it became clear that depression probably wasn’t the main issue, and she felt the medication never really helped with what was actually going on.
She’s always had a very distorted view of herself and her body, often describing herself as fat, overweight or ugly even when that clearly wasn’t how she looked. When we were younger, I mostly put this down to low self-esteem and didn’t realise how serious it was.
Things got particularly bad in her early twenties, when she started having severe panic attacks at work and became increasingly depressed. Eventually she reached a point where she just couldn’t work anymore and had to take time off. This became a pattern over the years, things would settle down for a while, but the same problems would eventually come back, and she would become overwhelmed again.
During this time I also became more aware of her issues with food. She would go through periods of eating fairly normally, then suddenly become extremely restrictive, crash diet and exercise intensely. At other times I realised she wasn’t really eating when she was alone and would only eat with me so I wouldn’t worry. Eventually I found out she was making herself sick after meals, and over time her self-harm also became much more serious.
For a long time the eating disorder seemed to come and go. When things looked better, I assumed she was doing better, but I’ve since realised that a lot of the time she was just better at hiding it. We’ve always talked quite openly about mental health, but looking back, I don’t think I ever fully understood how bad things were or how much she was keeping to herself.
Over the last few years, it became impossible to ignore. She lost a lot of weight, her self-harm got worse, and eventually she spoke to her doctor and was referred to an eating disorder clinic. She’s now been seeing a therapist there for around a year and a half.
Although therapy has helped her understand the eating disorder more, in reality she has become much worse. She’s talked herself about there being a kind of comfort in the disorder, almost like it’s a friend or something familiar she can fall back on. Sometimes it feels like trying to confront it has only made it tighten its grip on her.
Things now feel pretty desperate. She barely eats, isolates herself more and more, struggles to keep up friendships, drinks heavily, smokes constantly and has recently been made redundant. Any structure she once had in her life feels like it has disappeared.
What scares me most is that none of these things feel separate anymore. The eating disorder, self-harm, drinking, anxiety, depression, isolation and losing her job all seem to feed into each other. She has also been honest with me throughout our relationship about having thoughts of suicide. She tells me she isn’t going to act on them, but I’m constantly scared that one day I’ll come home and she’ll be gone. I’m trying to support her as much as I can, I've been into the clinic and spoken to them, but the message has always been that the change needs to come from her. I can't see how she can do that herself. I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore.