Lockdowns have been blamed for a sharp rise in teenage girls in the U.K. developing eating disorders and self-harming since 2020. The BBC has the story.
The increases were greatest among girls living in the wealthiest areas, which could be due to better GP access.
Young women have told the BBC that the lack of control over their lives during lockdown was a behavioural trigger.
The Government says it is investing in eating disorders services to help more children and young people.
Charities maintain everyone needs access to early support for mental health issues, no matter where they live.
Annabelle, 19, from Surrey, recalls how difficult she found lockdown.
“We had very little control over our lives – our GCSEs were cancelled, we had no say in what our grades were going to be. We couldn’t see people, we couldn’t control where we went. The only thing we could control was what you ate and how you looked – so that’s what I chose to focus on.”
Annabelle received help overcoming bulimia and is feeling better, but her family is still paying for therapy privately.
She says people don’t realise how common eating disorders are: “I don’t know a single girl or female friend who hasn’t had some sort of struggle with eating. It’s incredibly hard, but there isn’t enough help for everyone on the NHS.”
Sophie Rowland, 18, from South Shields, has been posting about her recovery from anorexia on TikTok. She loved food before the pandemic, but being stuck in the house during lockdown made her obsessive about exercise and watching workouts online.
“I just realised I couldn’t stop tracking calories. It had taken over my life. Everything was just food, food, food – and it was food that became the enemy.”
She told her mum one day, and says she was “very lucky” with the help she received from nurses, friends and family. Positive feedback from her videos have also aided her recovery and now she wants to help others.
Eating disorders and self-harming have been rising among children and young people for a number of years but “increased substantially” between 2020 and 2022, the study found.
Over that period, around 2,700 diagnoses of eating disorders were anticipated among 13-16-year-olds, but 3,862 were actually observed – 42% more than the expected figure.
In the same age group, 6,631 cases of self-harm were expected but 9,174 were recorded by GPs – 38% more than predicted.
Among 17-19-year-olds eating disorders also rose above expectations.
The analysis, by the University of Manchester, Keele University and University of Exeter, looked at nine million records belonging to patients aged 10-24 years, from nearly 2,000 GP practices across the UK.
Worth reading in full.
Who could have guessed that enforced isolation isn’t good for young people’s mental health. But why is the lesson the BBC draws always that Government needs to fund more services and never that maybe lockdown wasn’t such a smart move after all?
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Life is tough. We should be teaching youngsters mental resilience. Instead we scare them with the fear of a virus, we isolate them with lockdowns, steal their education by shutting schools, make them feel guilty for their white privilege, even confuse them over their gender. We tell them there will be a climate catastrophe, their jobs will be taken by AI, and in any case the housing ladder has been kicked away. Any wonder there is a range of mental disorders. This is a shameful way to treat the population, and children in particular.
Mental resilience makes for resistance against the government. The policy will always be fear and threats with some superficial material incentives thrown in to periodically appease the masses..
The mental disorders are in the adults propagating all this nonsense, and thereby transferring them to the young.
The same lockdown pressures will have been experienced by boys. How has this manifested?
I know of 2 teenage boys, both slightly autistic, both geeky types, who have had trouble going out of the house since lockdowns ended. They would both rather stay in their rooms, living in the virtual world. Their fear on going outside was palpable, apparently.
Increased suicide.
To be fair, that does remove the mentally unstable from the gene pool.
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/verified-on-a-government-watchlist
An official United States list of baddies.
“why is the lesson the BBC draws always that Government needs to fund more services and never that maybe lockdown wasn’t such a smart move after all?”
More services is definitely not the answer, of course it does generate and reinforce a reliance on medical services which in turn leads to a dependence on Pharma products. For a lifetime of course. No matter how short that might be.
Win, win as the saying goes.
Look at this though. I find this seriously upsetting actually. I didn’t even know they were doing this. People dying in hospital but instead of allowing loved ones to sit with them for comfort in their final hours nurses tied gloves filled with warm water to the patients’ hands! I mean, WTAF has gone wrong in society if healthcare staff must stoop to this treatment, denying loved ones the chance to say goodbye to family members in person? I thought I couldn’t be any more ashamed of hospital staff but this has reached a new low. Absolutely unforgiveable.
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1670857716888371200?cxt=HHwWgIDQ1bWPirAuAAAA
https://off-guardian.org/2023/06/22/universal-basic-income-the-anti-human-agenda/
UBI. This is an interesting piece from a woman called Zoe Carter. She states that she is a writer but this article is so convoluted I would have to question her assertion. Anyways…
https://off-guardian.org/2023/06/21/a-global-digital-compact-un-promoting-censorship-social-credit-much-more/
Now this is from the brilliant Kit Knightly. Who can write.
“To sum up, the Digital Global Compact is a piece of globalist legislation serving the final aim of globalist policy: Control of all aspects of life, achieved by inserting a digital filter between people and reality.”
I love that final sentence.
It’s a veritable Dumpathon!
Don’t you feel a lot lighter for it though?
Well, if these articles reach a wider audience so much the better but they won’t get read in the NR. Kit Knightly is ALWAYS worth a read.
https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1671915995676409857
Eating disorders, to a certain extent, involve loathing or disgust of your body. To this extent they have a similarity with believing you’re transgender or trapped in the wrong body. Wanting to control your body e.g. by chest binding or taking puberty blockers also gives young people control over something when lockdown removed their control over so much of their lives. I wonder if any academic is brave enough to try and estimate the extent to which lockdown is responsible for the alarming rise in the number of young people identifying as trans, although the woke nonsense that is taught to kids from an early age obviously plays a large part in this.
Not my problem, I was always against lockdowns.
I wonder how much the continual obsession with ‘obesity’ and reducing meat consumption to appease the weather gods, have contributed to dietary choices made by young people?