why are so many young girls addicted to starving themselves?

“It’s like being possessed,” is how 19-year-old Emily describes living with anorexia. Fresh out of hospital after almost five months of specialist care, she knows she needs to maintain a healthy weight if she wants to go to university. She’s a smart young woman and regrets the years she’s already lost to an all-consuming obsession with self-starvation. But there’s a voice in her head reminding her that not eating makes her feel “invincible”, that she gets a rush of “power, control” that she’s willing to risk her life for.

Emily is one of three young women who described their struggle with the potentially fatal eating disorder in Channel 5's raw, feature-length documentary. Combining thoughtful interviews and video diaries, it was made by the team responsible for 2020's award-winning Suicidal: In Our Own Words. That film did a great job of cutting through the psychological jargon and allowing distressed humans to explain their self-destructive urges in painfully relatable terms. Anorexic works in the same way, giving sufferers space to explain behaviour that can appear so illogical from the outside.

Emily, Lottie, also 19, and Hannah, 21, weren’t stupid or stubborn. All shared the frustrations of their friends, families and doctors. Prior to filming, they'd all starved themselves into a life-threatening condition. They knew they’d been at risk of organ failure and heart attack. They knew the risks of infertility and long-term bone damage. They had all sacrificed years of their youth to anorexia. And they all knew eating should be an easy and pleasurable route back to health. But they all described a loud “voice” in their heads that overrode their common sense. “I know what I’m doing is wrong,” sobbed Hannah, “but I don't know why I can’t just turn around and stop it.”

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