00:04I could never understand what had triggered you from being a kind of normal, healthy 17-year-old
00:13to lose so much weight so quickly. I couldn't understand what was going through your mind.
00:17I think I always had this underlying depression, this underlying low, where I always felt like
00:23I wasn't good enough. The only way I felt like I could show the world that I wasn't okay was
00:29by controlling what I'm eating, by losing weight, by having this, like, one thing that I could control.
00:35Anorexia was a way of me showing that I wasn't okay.
00:40I couldn't even come to terms with how to stop it or how to help you.
00:45It was like you were completely determined to kill yourself.
00:50And I can remember at one stage saying, if you want to go ahead and starve yourself to death, you
00:54go ahead.
00:55I obviously didn't mean it, but I was so helpless.
00:57Yeah, I'll always remember you saying that to me.
01:00I'll always remember thinking then that it wasn't just me that this was affecting, it was everyone.
01:06When I did start opening up to you and everyone else around me, I decided I really wanted to get
01:11better.
01:11I wanted to live a life where I felt worthy of living.
01:17Thank God you did, because from my point of view, it was realising that it was a serious mental health
01:23issue and that we had to treat it as a serious mental health issue.
01:27And that's why now we are talking about it, but I didn't.
01:31I got it badly wrong.
01:32We got it badly wrong.
01:33But then I don't know how people would know how to deal with that.
01:38Watching your daughter waste away, how can you deal with that?
01:41And I can remember at one stage, someone explained you have three choices.
01:44Yeah, so I was a nurse in the NHS unit that I was in who said to me, you just
01:49have to do this.
01:51You have three choices.
01:52You either die from this, you live the life you're living now with this half person, or...
01:58You get better.
01:59You get better.
02:00And it sort of jogged the memory of the fact that there had been a Maddie before anorexia, and that
02:06there could be a Maddie after anorexia.
02:08And it was that image that it was possible to live without a mental illness that really helped me power
02:16through.
02:17I feel like finally being able to open up to you has made our relationship so much stronger, because I'm
02:24now living a happy, healthy life.
02:26I'm at university, and I can talk to you about everything, probably too much, but I feel like we've kind
02:33of reached a point where our relationship is strong and we're happy.
02:36We do talk much more, we have a much better relationship, it's just a shame we had to go through
02:39that ghastliness.
02:41I can say now that we are through this, and there is hope for anyone suffering with any mental illness.
03:01Thank you, Lord.
Comments