Interview: How Emily broke free of anorexia and set out to help others recover

EMILY Cramphorn admits she is a perfectionist.

Which is why six years ago when she began to be bullied at her new school she stopped eating. She was just 10 years old.

“When I changed schools, I moved up a year,” says the 16-year-old. “Academically I could keep up with the others but emotionally I was still a child. I was told I was fat and so I decided to stop eating.”

It wasn’t long before she was starting to make herself vomit and within a year she had developed a full-blown eating disorder. It could have easily claimed her life, but Emily did recover and is now setting up a support group to help other teenagers.

“I know what it is like to have no-one to talk to,” says the Brough teenager whose blog – which works against “pro-ana” websites which promote anorexia, and campaigns to get better help for young people with eating disorders – has won her an award from the eating disorders charity, Beat. “I have been there and I know things could have been very different for me. The support for young people with eating disorders is woeful and I would hate to think that people turn to pro-ana sites. I want to provide somewhere for them to go and talk if they want to. They can set the agenda.”

Today Emily seems so full of self-control that it is hard to imagine her being ruled by an eating disorder. She comes from a happy, stable home and admits if it hadn’t been for the support of her parents it might have been a different story.

“They were always there for me. They were strict with me when I needed it. It didn’t appreciate it as the time but now I know.”

When Emily moved up a year she missed the last year of primary school and she believes this was the trigger for her eating disorder.

“I just didn’t fit in. I was bullied about my weight and about being a bit different from everyone else. I have always been a perfectionist and put a lot of pressure on myself. I wasn’t ready to be in the grown-up world and yet that is where I found myself. Losing weight made me feel happy, but the more weight I lost the more I felt I needed to lose.”

At first her parents didn’t really notice the change in their daughter.

“Looking back I wish we had never agreed to her going up a year,” says her mum Penny. “She was so keen because she said she needed more challenges and two schools said they thought she was ready. But we now realise emotionally she wasn’t.

“Soon after she became withdrawn and then she seemed to catch every illness going. We were backwards and forwards from the doctor, but no-one spotted the signs. Her body shape was changing but we thought it was down to her growing up. We had no idea she had the onset of an eating disorder. She was only 10 and it never occurred to us.”

It was only when Emily received a vile text while on holiday in New York that her parents realised the extent of the bullying and that she was struggling to eat.

On their return Emily was taken straight to a paediatrician, who diagnosed migraine.

“I said I thought she had an eating disorder, but it took us from March to September to get a diagnosis of Anorexia Nervosa and an offer of any help.

“By then she’d had it for 15 months and all she was doing was getting advice from pro-ana sites and learning how to become even more devious.”

Emily was referred to a local Children and Adolescent Mental health unit, but they did not specialise in eating disorders and after six months she was discharged.

“They said unless she snapped out of it she would become a revolving door psychiatric patient or die,” says Penny. “One in five children die of anorexia. There were five children with it in that unit and it wasn’t going to be my child that died,” says Penny.

But the Cramphorns were frustrated by the lack of specialist services available.

“There are only about five units in the entire county. I did a lot of research and visited them all and I knew where I wanted to send her but they wouldn’t agree to fund it. If your child has an illness such as cancer they move heaven and earth, but when it is something like this no-one seems to want to help. We know we have made some huge mistakes. I even tried to force her to eat something once, which I am ashamed of. But you get so desperate.”

Emily never talks about how low her weight got or what lengths she went to. “I don’t want people reading this to get any ideas on how they might lose weight,” she says responsibly. “Anorexia is very competitive.”

Her weight did plummet to a dangerous level and, when her organs started to fail, she was admitted to hospital where she had to be tube-fed.

“I did realise that it was tearing my parents apart and I wasn’t happy about it, but I wasn’t prepared to eat even then.”

Emily spent another six months in the local mental health unit, while Penny bombarded the PCT with requests for her to be transferred to a specialist unit in London. In the end, due to a technicality they agreed.

“Emily needed seven-days-a-week care and the local unit only offered five and so they agreed to transfer her to the Ellen Mead Centre in London.”

This was to prove to be the turning point.

“They were very strict,” says Emily, “but they knew how to handle people with eating disorders. I refused to cooperate to start with but then I realised that if I didn’t cooperate I was going to lose everything, and possibly even my life, and I didn’t want that.”

She spent four months in the unit with only a couple of telephone calls a week and one visit from her family, but, for whatever reason, it allowed Emily, who now wants to train as a psychiatrist helping children with eating disorders, to start to break free from the anorexia.

“There needs to be much more support for young people with eating disorders or else they will turn to pro-ana web sites,” say Emily. “There are more and more girls and boys suffering eating disorders and it is time that everyone took them seriously.”