Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) for securing the debate and other Members who have spoken. I also pay tribute to Members who are not with us today: the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), with whom I have worked on this topic, and my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher), who has valiantly led a campaign to recognise the need for a men’s mental health strategy. We have very much a cross-party agenda on the issue. I am pleased to work with those colleagues from the red wall, from the deep red flag of the hard left and from the deep orange of the hon. Member for Bath.

This is a totally cross-party issue, as we have heard, because this condition affects all our constituents and all our constituencies. It affects people of all ages and, of course, of both sexes. I recognise and agree with the points that have been made about unhelpful stereotypes. Some stereotypes are, of course, helpful in the sense that they point to a general truth, from which there will be many exceptions.

I spent most of my career before Parliament working in prisons, where there is a clear difference between how the two sexes express the distress that is caused by incarceration. Men tend to externalise their distress through fighting and violence against others; women internalise their distress through self-harm. Those are generalisations—there are many women who fight and men who self-harm—but they have some validity and are relevant to how we approach this particular mental condition.

There are different ways in which men and women and girls and boys express distress and mental health conditions. The fact is that the outworking of eating disorders is in many ways the same: extreme ill health and enormous distress to the sufferer or patient. I recognise the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) about the distress experienced by the staff who work in eating disorder clinics. It is a very distressing condition.

As we have heard, a quarter of eating disorder sufferers are men and boys. The sources are complex—not being an expert, I do not want to stray too far into this—but it is worth acknowledging that it seems to be generally agreed that the source of eating disorders, and anorexia nervosa in particular, is a need for control. There is, of course, a perfectly healthy desire to be fit and healthy. It is appropriate that people want to control their appetites—we, not our appetites, need to be in charge—but we see that healthy desire to manage one’s health, fitness, food intake and exercise regime spilling over into a different sort of control, which itself becomes controlling. We become slave to a different sort of appetite.

I want to speak up for the men who come forward and identify themselves as suffering from eating disorders. That is a very brave thing to do. The other stereotype that we have discussed, which is entirely true, is that not enough men talk about mental health and their own mental health conditions. As we have heard, a fifth of male eating disorder sufferers have never spoken about their condition to anybody. We therefore need to raise awareness. I pay tribute to Beat, Hope Virgo and other campaigners for their commitment during this Eating Disorders Awareness Week to the cause of men’s mental health and eating disorders in men.

We know that the result of not coming forward early is that diagnosis comes later, and therefore treatment is so much harder. It is also disappointing to read in the research that the majority of men who receive treatment for eating disorders or ask for help are disappointed with the service they receive. I dare say that that is the same for women. There is obviously a fault in the provision of services.

What to do? I endorse the points that have been made about the need to raise general public awareness, which is the purpose of this debate as much as anything. People need to be able to recognise the signs and symptoms in their loved ones and friends, school friends, students and colleagues. We need more training for doctors, particularly GPs, to recognise the symptoms and signpost to good treatment. We need more services before hospital, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North said, and we need more acute services. I pay tribute to the Cotswold House unit at the Savernake Hospital in my constituency, which is a tremendous in-patient unit. In practice, it is under-resourced, because there are not enough beds, as my right hon. Friend said.

I will end with this point: crucially, we need more support for step-down services. It is not enough just to get somebody back to the appropriate weight. It can take months and months for people to be healthy again and to be free of treatment, so we cannot just say, “You get the acute treatment, then you’re back to health, and you’re free.” We need to support people for many months more, and we need more provision in the community for that step-down service.