The broadcaster Mark Austin has revealed how he struggled to understand his daughter’s anorexia and “failed utterly to grasp that she was seriously mentally ill”. Austin’s daughter Maddy, now 22, became ill in 2012, losing four stone and changing from a healthy and promising athlete to an “emaciated, ghostlike figure”. As a father you have to make a decision and I made the wrong one. Austin described how things hit rock bottom for Maddy after a failed spell at a private inpatient unit on a regime of forced feeding. She recalled: “Eventually it was a local NHS nurse who really understood me and saw the Maddy without the demons.

Source: The Guardian February 05, 2017 17:09 UTC