Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Charles Walker Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sir Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth). I call him my right hon. Friend because I have been working with him on diabulimia. He has huge expertise in the area and I am rather new to the field. I shall be brief.

We are all occasionally touched by surgery cases we get, and about 10 months ago a couple came to see me whose daughter had recently taken her life after a long battle with diabulimia. It is terribly distressing to talk to parents who have lost a child to suicide, and perhaps even more so given the terrible background to that suicide—although all suicides are to be mourned equally. The Minister has been fantastic. I have been in correspondence with her about the case, and about diabulimia.

For the record, I shall give a quick overview of what led to the tragedy of a young woman aged 27, who was a teacher, taking her own life. She had suffered with eating disorders for a number of years and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. As her parents said, she became giddy with joy. This is not a normal reaction when someone is diagnosed with diabetes. She was giddy with joy because she realised that as a sufferer of diabetes, she could suppress her weight through insulin abuse. In her parents’ words, the prescribing of insulin weaponised her eating disorder.

The concern that I and the young woman’s parents have, which I have raised with the Minister, is that too many healthcare professionals are unsighted in this area. When they prescribe insulin to an adolescent female or young woman, they are not alive to the risk that there may be an undiagnosed or undeclared eating disorder, or an underlying risk of an eating disorder, and that what is actually happening is that someone with a severe condition, or a propensity to a severe condition, is being handed a toxic substance that might save their life in one way but lead to the loss of it in another. There is a need for really strong background discussions with young women and girls when they are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes about their mental wellbeing and whether there is any danger of an eating disorder being present.

I have taken the case up with the Minister and I pay tribute to her. She is aware that the NHS is currently piloting services joining up treatment for diabetes and for eating disorders in London and on the south coast. Our most recent correspondence was last summer and I hope that, if not today, at some stage the Government will be able to update the House as to the success of the pilots and whether they will lead to a wider roll-out.

As the Minister said in her letter, the pilots will provide a valuable insight into the impact insulin prescribing has on individuals at risk of developing eating disorders, and they are an important step forward in recognising and treating diabulimia and minimising its devastating impact on patients and their families. That is exactly what we want to hear from the Department of Health, and I congratulate it on recognising the scale of the problem. The Minister went on to say that raising awareness among health professionals and alerting them to the risk associated with insulin and eating disorders is one of the Government’s priorities.

The debate is hugely timely. I hope that further measures will emerge from it across the NHS—across GP and mental health surgeries—that contribute to ensuring that no families have to lose a child in the way my constituents did.