The anorexia clinic for girls as young as SIX

Source: Daily Mail

A haunting dispatch from inside the hospital that saves children from starving themselves to death… before they’ve even reached their teens

Slumped semi-conscious on the sofa, Megan Archer summoned up what little strength she had left and fixed the paramedic attempting to hand her a vital glucose tablet with a determined gaze. ‘How many calories does it have in it?’ she said.

Looking at the fragile frame of their 13-year-old daughter — appearing years younger thanks to a cruel illness — Jane and Phil Archer were hit by a wave of utter despair. Those few plaintive words summed up how, in a few short months, anorexia had transformed their healthy daughter into a painfully thin shadow of her former self.

‘It was a terrifying moment,’ remembers Jane, 47. ‘When she collapsed at home, complaining of chest pains, it hammered home how desperately we needed help. She was slipping in and out of consciousness in front of us, that’s when I dialled 999.

‘But when the paramedic arrived and tried to give her just half a glucose tablet and suddenly she was alert enough to be asking him how many calories were in it, I knew that despite doing all we could as parents, we couldn’t make her feed herself, the illness was more powerful than we were.’

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