Noise4Boys and Eating Disorders

This week Emma Taylor talks to us about her personal experience with Bulimia affecting someone very close to her. This blog has tackled the important conversation which we have spoken about many times before - being able to talk about things. Eating disorders are a sensitive topic and one which can't be put into specific boxes. Every situation is specific to each person and all we can aim to achieve is breaking down barriers created by society to ensure people never feel alone or helpless.

"Bulimia is a difficult word to hear from the closest person in your life. This is what I heard from my boyfriend of 10 months at the time. He had been struggling with bulimia throughout our whole relationship. I knew that there was something wrong since the beginning of our relationship. He would sometimes disappear for 10 minutes at a time when we were out in pubs or when we were just hanging out with our group of friends. Initially, I dismissed these disappearances as him just going out for a cigarette or taking a phone call or something. But after a while I noticed that he was losing weight rapidly and that’s when I started to get worried. Slowly he started talking about his weight with me and our friends. He told us that he had a “stomach problem” he used to joke about it with us all the time, and he wanted us to joke about it as well. He even got a t-shirt saying that his stomach was “out of order”. Once he’d opened up to us about his “stomach problem” we started going to doctors and hospital appointments together to try to find out what this problem was and how to deal with it. He even had a camera down his oesophagus to see if there was something wrong with the lining of his stomach.

The reason I’m telling you all of this is that he decided to go through all of these doctors and hospital appointments, and he wanted me and our friends to make jokes about his “problem” just to try and cover the fact that he was suffering with bulimia. He went through all of that just so he didn’t have to tell us that he was suffering with one of the most severe mental disorders. This got me questioning what this says about our society and our views around mental health, that my own boyfriend couldn’t tell me that he was suffering with bulimia. Don’t get me wrong, I know that society is slowly changing through campaigns like #noiseforboys, but there is obviously still something wrong with the way we view male mental health and especially men with eating disorders. Many people think that eating disorders are just a women’s issue, but men are now being put under just as much pressure as women to conform to certain body types and standards, from the media, magazines and TV shows. So, no wonder men are suffering with disorders such as bulimia and anorexia.

According to recent statistics, 25 per cent of bulimia sufferers are male and 40 per cent of people suffering with an eating disorder suffer from bulimia. These are no insignificant numbers, and they prove that we need to talk about these types of mental disorders more; we need to talk about them with our friends, our families and even with our work colleges. By normalising the discussion around eating disorders in men, eventually it may become easier for men to tell their loved ones that they are struggling with an eating disorder. Rather than hiding it and suffering in silence." The important message I think to take away from this blog, is that yes there have been barriers put up by society which have to be broken down, so that people feel they can turn to the right people for help. Nonetheless, it is equally as important to realise that the difficulty around talking about your mental and physically health should not be dismissed. It is not always easy to talk, even to your closest friends, family and professional, and no one is saying it is. However, working hard to make it "as" easy as possible is all we can do.