7 Ways to Support Anorexic Young People

Last night my wife and I watched the BBC2 documentary with Louis Theron on Anorexia, which has prompted this post.

Youth ministries can be rife with all kinds of eating disorders – and classically we respond to this epidemic by simply talking about self image and inner value. As if we could convince them that they are beautiful, then they’ll suddenly get better and start eating normally again. Messages on identity are genuinely important, but rarely do they adequately address the needs of a young person dealing with a diagnosed mental disorder like anorexia.

And that’s where we should start. Diagnosed anorexia is treated in mental health departments. It is often wrapped up in anxiety, paranoia, and other chemical vulnerabilities in the mind. This means that the condition, the symptoms, and the treatments are dramatically different depending on personality.

• For some young people, anorexia means a pathological and carnal phobia of food, and what eating does to their bodies.
• For others, it is a form of self-harm or punishment; a painful response to inordinate guilt or a denial of things they feel they don’t deserve.
• For some it is a response to trauma or tragedy – a way of making change happen to be more acceptable to themselves or others.
• For again others, it creates a numbness that enables them to deal with other painful or overwhelming feelings.

Thus you will find young people who are filled with shame about how they deal with eating and exercise – and they will hide from you. You will then find others who are proud, and even militant about their sense of confused piety and discipline. Some will have no intention of recovery, and others will have no acceptance of their problem. More than likely, however, several of these things will exist together in a constant state tension and battle.

Anorexia – like any mental health problem – is never clean lined or simple.

It also comes with all kinds of misunderstandings and resentment. ‘Why don’t you just eat more?’ or ‘Don’t you know that you look better with more meat on your bones!’ As if they could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and think suddenly objectively or rationally.

Anorexia smothers rational thinking. It comes with intense feelings of guilt, fear, judgement and social anxiety – and it proffers its own destructive solutions.

So what do we do about it as youth leaders?

1. Remember that we are not doctors.

We’re not psychologists, psychiatrists, key-workers, or mental health nurses. Our job is not treatment, or job is support.

We should remember to work with professionals and to recommend or report to them to do what we can’t.

2. Treat them like distinct and individual people

Mental health needs a fuller understanding across the board. I’ve tried to demonstrate above some of the many different ways young people might experience this condition. Each of them will need a different response and will play by a different set of rules.

We can’t learn broad responses – we need to work with them individually.

3. Ask them what they need

Allow them to speak into their own condition, and to help you understand what language they need. This will also help you be able to look out for their triggers and provide for the care of those triggers in your projects.

4. Love them unconditionally

It’s easy to get frustrated by conditions that we can’t understand. But our job isn’t to fix young people – it’s to lead them to Jesus. There are few things that do this better than creating a safe place of love and security in your ministry.

5. Don’t enable

Make sure you know enough of them, and have spent enough time with their family – and maybe even nurses or social workers – to be able to help them recover. This means creating similar boundaries within your projects for them as they’ll be experiencing at home.

6. Be for their recovery

Show that your proud of them when they’re doing well and when they’re working with doctors. Mental health conditions tend to come with a pathological suspicion of treatment. Help them with encouragement that they’re doing the right thing by getting help.

7. Don’t minimise their experience

Whatever kind of grip eating disorders have, or whatever form they take, they are always destructive. Be careful not to demonise or trivialise conditions like anorexia in how you joke or talk. Always here young people out and take them seriously about what it is they’re feeling – whether or not you can relate.