Anorexia: "I hope for days when I can accept myself" - an affected 16

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Lea has gained ten kilograms in the past few months.

A daily struggle – also emotionally.

The 16-year-old is still thin.

When she looks in the mirror, she sees something different.

"Because you have a disturbed perceptual picture, you think you're twice as broad," she says.

Actually, she has never felt comfortable in her body.

At some point she secretly ate less and less.

In the end, Lea had lost 20 kilograms when she came to the psychosomatic ward for children and adolescents at the clinic in Nuremberg.

Since the beginning of the corona crisis, this has increasingly had to do with anorexic patients like Lea.

"It's one and a half to twice as many as before the pandemic," says Chief Physician Patrick Nonell.

The Federal Association of Eating Disorders sees a similar development across the country.

"Due to the fact that the numbers have increased so much, there are no therapy places," says the association's chairman, Andreas Schnebel, who also heads the Anad counseling center in Munich.

"It's also getting tight in the inpatient facilities." Even before the pandemic, therapy places were scarce, and waiting times were sometimes long.

Evaluations by health insurance companies among their insured persons also indicate that since Corona, more young people with an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia have had to be treated.

According to this, the DAK-Gesundheit for 2020 determined an increase in hospital treatments for eating disorders of 9 percent compared to the previous year, among 15 to 17 year olds it is 13 percent more.

According to the KKH, there was a disproportionate increase of around 7 percent among 13 to 18 year olds.

The health insurers have evaluated a total of data from around one million insured persons under the age of 18.

The experts do not have a reliable explanation for this, only an assumption shared by the Nuremberg specialist Nonell.

Girls in particular who suffer from anorexia are often not able to cope with stress so well, he says.

During the pandemic, they suffered particularly badly from uncertainty and the fear of losing control.

"Controlling your eating behavior is a form of coping strategy to gain more control again." If a child or young person develops an eating disorder, there is not just one cause behind it, but a combination of different factors.

What exactly triggered her anorexia, Lea cannot say.

During the lockdown times, she was home alone a lot because her mother and stepfather continued to work.

"It definitely made it easier for me to hide it," she says.

She ate very irregularly, skipped meals or vomited after binge eating.

»The more fragile the body image, the more open you are to this influence«

Lea was 15 years old at the time.

A typical age for anorexia.

Girls in particular suffer from this during puberty.

Younger girls, some of them as young as 8 or 9, have been showing up at Andreas Schnebel's Munich counseling center for a number of years.

"That has to do with the fact that everything starts earlier today, like puberty and access to social media," says the expert.

Various studies support these assumptions, says Silja Vocks, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the University of Osnabrück.

The early onset of puberty can mean that physical maturity may not be compatible with mental maturity.

At the same time, children and young people are using social media earlier and earlier, where they are constantly confronted with embellished images.

»The more fragile the body image, the more open you are to this influence.«

Special anorexia forums and pictures or videos of emaciated teenagers under special hashtags on TikTok, Instagram and other social networks are particularly problematic, says expert Iren Schulz from the “Look!” initiative.

In the past few months, Lea has learned to eat again.

"I hope there will be days when I can accept myself for who I am," she says.

"I want to be able to be a normal teenager."

However, according to Nonell, only about half of all anorexics succeed in doing this.

30 percent suffer setbacks, in 20 percent the disease becomes chronic, with dramatic consequences for their health.

“It's a very serious condition.

Two percent of those affected die from it,” says Nonell.

Expert Schulz therefore sees a special responsibility in social media when they are aimed at such a young target group.

"There's still a lot to do," she says.

When dealing with incorrect body images, however, it could also be partly due to a lack of awareness of the problem.

"It's a gray area - not like pornography, where it's regulated by law."

wbr/dpa