Hi there! My name is Luke Evans, a 1st year biomedical sciences student at Cardiff University & a Beat Young Ambassador; a role I adopted in January 2018, just over 2 years after recieving a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (AN) and getting (quite frankly amazing) treatment from my local Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services.
This 2 year period - which felt like an eternity to myself & my loved ones - seems short when you consider that some people suffering from an eating disorder suffer chronically. Research in Australia has shown that the average duration of AN is 8 years, while it is slightly shorter (5 years) for bulimia nervosa (BN) (1). These are by no means the maximum terms of illness.
Recovery from AN made me a much stronger person, and it ignited in me a love for psychology & psychiatry, eventually giving rise to a fascination with medicine as a whole. I had been mentally ill, and I wanted to understand why. Yet anything could go wrong with everything inside our bodies, and I wanted to understand that too.
That passion for understanding the goings-on of the human body, in health & in sickness, is what lead me to pursue a career in medicine. Sometimes it’s scary to think that without my love for science I’d probably still want to write fiction novels as I did when I was younger, and at this moment in time I’d probably be sitting at my desk suffering from a terrible case of writer’s block.
Just the thought of it makes me shiver!
On the 23rd of November, 2018, I was invited to attend Beat’s Frontline conference to take part in a Young Ambassador’s Q&A panel. The dedication of the parents in the audience was inspiring; caring for somebody with an ED can be tough, it may even be a 24 hour job. They took the time to travel to this conference - to learn more about their loved one’s illness, despite the stigma & harsh reality associated with it.
During a Q&A panel involving healthcare professionals, one member of the audience remarked that it was difficult to find quality information about the science behind eating disorders. It’s certainly out there, but perhaps not all in one place, and perhaps not written in a way that non-scientists can relate to.
And so that brings us here. In this series of blogs I’ll be discussing eating disorders from the perspective of diagnostics, psychology, neuroscience, biology, & medicine. I’d love you to join me!
Please remember that I’m not in any way a healthcare professional, nor a genius scientist! I’m still very early on in my scientific career, and everything I write (except for personal experience & anecdotes) is supported by scientific literature that I have interpreted and expressed in my own words. At the end of each chapter there will be a list of references, and if you want to understand a topic at a deeper level I would highly recommend checking out those sources if you can
Best wishes,
Luke :)
Next in series: ED Science #2: What are Eating Disorders?
References
(1) Beat. Statistics for Journalists. Available from: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/media-centre/eating-disorder-statistics [Accessed 17th December 2018]
Kommentare