Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Margaret Ferrier

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on having secured this important debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for having agreed to it.

I will not repeat the statistics, because the hon. Member for Bath covered them brilliantly. She highlighted the scale of the problem and the fact that it is growing more among young men; of course, Eating Disorders Awareness Week 2023 particularly highlights the challenge for young men. I will focus on some constituency cases that I have come across recently, and on some areas where we can do better to raise awareness in order to start to tackle the root causes, thereby hopefully helping future generations of young people.

I say young people, and we all know that eating disorders are most likely to impact on 17-year-old girls, but the stark reality is that they can endure into much later life. I remember meeting groups of women in this place who were well into their 40s and still suffering from eating disorders. That is not to paint too negative a picture, because we know that people can recover from eating disorders. With the right support and, crucially, early intervention, eating disorders can be tackled successfully. However, we also know that more and more people are suffering from eating disorders in this country today and that covid exacerbated that. Being locked down in our own homes, confronted with image after image on social media, undoubtedly contributed to the problem.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Social media algorithms will serve to those with eating disorders more and more content that encourages harmful and dangerous behaviours. That is particularly worrying for younger and adolescent sufferers. Does the right hon. Member agree that platforms cannot be allowed to continue to profit from that via advertisements, and that the Online Safety Bill provides the perfect opportunity to address that?

[Caroline Nokes]

That was exactly what I was going to ask the Minister: can we please make sure that the online safety legislation is used as a tool to oblige social media platforms to clean up their acts when it comes to profiting from legal but undoubtedly extremely harmful forms of advertising to people who are already suffering from very serious medical conditions? When it comes to eating disorders—specifically anorexia nervosa, which is the most lethal mental health condition there is—we have to make sure that we do not trivialising or dismiss them, regarding them as something that happens only to young girls and they get over it. The stark reality is that eating disorders kill more people than any other psychiatric illness.

We have seen from the evidence provided to all Members by the Royal College of Psychiatrists the increase in incidence, but we also know that waiting times are up hugely. I return to my initial point: early intervention is crucial. When somebody with an eating disorder asks for help, that is the time to give it to them, not 12, 24 or even more weeks later. We know there is a huge challenge with transfers from children’s to adult services. Too often, sufferers will fall through the cracks and be forced to go back to the beginning of a waiting list.

I want to highlight the case of one of my constituents— I will not give her name—who is currently suffering from a severe eating disorder and has been for years. She had been in children’s services for years but recently turned 18, which brought with it the challenge of finding her appropriate support. She is currently in an adult mental health bed in a secure ward. The stark reality is that she and two other girls in the area covered by the Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust were competing for the one bed available at Leigh House, which is the Hampshire-based specialist support unit for eating disorders. There we have it: an 18-year-old in an adult secure mental health unit, and a real challenge among clinicians to decide whether they will try to treat the physical symptoms of the eating disorder or the mental health conditions, and whether a mental health condition should take precedence over the physical problems.

I then heard from the trust that my constituent was having to be transferred every single day to be force fed with a tube because staff in the mental health unit were not able and did not want to do that. I believe that at just 18 someone is still a child. We know that with eating disorder sufferers development is often slower and young people are more childlike. Yet they are effectively forced to live in an adult mental health ward while suffering from a severe eating disorder and needing specialist help. Furthermore, training is crucial and support for staff who treat people with eating disorders is equally so. It is incredibly gruelling and, in no uncertain terms, a hideous process to have to force feed someone. We cannot imagine the impact that has on staff.

On social media content and algorithms, what does the Minister believe we can do to better protect young people? What can we do to give them the tools they need to be more resilient and to understand, when they are being pushed social media content, what is good and what is not—what is harmful and what is less harmful? I am proud to have stood repeatedly in this Chamber and called for personal, social, health and economic education to be a mandatory part of the curriculum, and proud that a Conservative Government have achieved that, but we also need to ensure that teachers are better equipped to teach PSHE, and I repeat my call for it to be mandatory up to the age of 18. It is not good enough to say that young people have to stay in education—school or college—or training until they are 18 but not to equip them with crucial life skills between 16 and 18. I get that the good colleges will do that, but many will not, so I ask the Minister to work with her colleagues in the Department for Education to ensure that the highest possible quality PSHE is delivered by teachers who feel and, indeed, are equipped to deliver it.

I want to talk briefly about stigma. I am conscious that this Eating Disorders Awareness Week we are highlighting eating disorders in boys and men. Stigma is still a huge challenge and it is undoubtedly worse for men and boys. When we look at the statistics, we see that one in five does not ever even say to anybody else that they think they might be suffering from an eating disorder. How on earth can someone get help if they cannot even talk about it?

It is incredibly difficult for young men to find their way in the world. They are under massive pressures through body dysmorphia or through the images they see, which are wholly unrealistic and unachievable. There are fitness apps on which the proponents will be taking significant amounts of steroids to achieve a physique that is, to be frank, virtually impossible for the ordinary person—the ordinary man—to achieve, and we know that over-exercising is every bit as much a part of eating disorders as not consuming calories. I am particularly aware that we need to find mechanisms to support young men, through the education system, so that they recognise the challenges around over-exercising, the dangers of steroid abuse and, frankly, the wholly unrealistic male body image that is being promoted to them.

I visited April House in Southampton, a specialist over-18 eating disorder unit, years ago now. That is to my shame: I should go back and say hello again. What was striking was that in a room of women, there was one man, and his particular problem was running. Every single day, he was running a marathon, and he could not rest mentally unless he had run those 26 miles every single day. Let us all just imagine what that was doing to his body and how incredibly weak and damaged he was by it. If we do nothing else today, let us encourage more men to speak up, encourage people to be braver, and ensure that we speak with a united voice from this Chamber. This is not a party political issue; it is absolutely a cross-party issue that we have to do more to support eating disorder sufferers.

High Streets

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Margaret Ferrier

Tuesday 19th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Ind)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing today’s debate. Over the past few years, as the hon. Lady has said, we have seen an increase in businesses moving away from physical retail space to an online model. The move has benefited retailers at the top levels of their companies, as it comes with associated savings in areas such as business rates or, for us Scots, non-domestic rates. Such moves, however, have a heavy impact on local communities: fewer jobs, for example, or a lack of accessibility.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind hon. Members to keep interventions brief.

[Margaret Ferrier]

Yes, Ms Nokes. Would the hon. Member agree that the Government should incentivise retailers to maintain a physical presence?