People with eating disorders feel like the Church doesn’t care but here’s how they can step up

Mental health campaigner Hope Virgo explains the additional challenges people with eating disorders face in the Church and how we can all do better.

I stood there staring at my reflection in the mirror, wiping the sweat off my upper lip. I splashed myself with cold water looking at my face in the reflection and it barely felt recognisable. I counted to ten and left the bathroom. The sun hit me immediately as I headed to the main tent to find the rest of the youth group. As I sat, listening to yet another message about how much God loves us and how we are made in his image, all I could think about was the last few days, months, years. How I had just before the meeting been purging in the bathroom. How I was consumed by calorie counting in my head. And as I sat there looking round others, the intense shame that I felt grew. The shame that there was something categorically wrong with me, a shame that was keeping me in this space and leaving me to suffer in silence.

This was me, Soul Survivor 2006, just a few months before being admitted to mental health services, being diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, which ended in a year long stay in a mental health hospital. While it wasn’t the church’s fault that I ended up in treatment, being in an environment where there was very little understanding of eating disorders, and no one who spoke about them meant that I stayed quiet.