My anorexia ruined my life at school, and yet my teachers didn’t help me

(I’m placing a potential trigger warning on this post due to some of the subjects that are mentioned)

Whilst doing a presentation during my tutorial at college about why mental illnesses aren’t adjectives (it was similar to a previous blog post of mine) I got into a debate with a teaching assistant who was present about the lack of support for mental illness at school, and it got me thinking about how little support I actually received. Now I’m not talking about during secondary school (years 7-11) as when I was there I didn’t ask for any help (though I did need it), I’m focussing more on my experiences whilst attending sixth form.

My mental health was the reason my school work began to suffer. Before my anorexia I had been a fairly average student, I didn’t fail anything (other than Spanish) but I wasn’t straight A’s across the board either. It was during year 10, the first year of my GCSE’s, that I first remember my eating disorder beginning to rear its head, and although my GCSE’s don’t seem to have been affected by this, it wasn’t until I began year 12 that my head became the awful place to be in that it is today. It was during year 12 that I began to self harm, I would binge and purge many times a week, as well as restricting for days on end. And it was during year 12 that I began to contemplate suicide – I just wanted it to all be over. As a result of this, my school work took a back seat. How could I be expected to concentrate on the poems of Lord Alfred Tennyson when all I could think about was how much I hated myself? I was so unhappy, so so unhappy, and yet my school did nothing.

It was during sixth form that I was suffering the most, and for the most part I was suffering in complete silence. Despite the weight dropping off of me, and despite me becoming more and more withdrawn, no word of worry was even uttered. The “pastoral care” lady in our sixth form as she called herself, who would often reiterate how she was a part of the student support team, didn’t even ask how I was. She was too busy telling me off for not staying in school during my frees – even though I felt like a complete outsider and the thought of being there made my anxiety worse – to actually ask me why I was so unhappy. But even when I was finally honest with my teachers and my peers about what I was going through, the support still was not there.

I missed a fair few lessons for appointments and what not, and even though I’d explain to my teachers where I was going and why I needed to be there (I even brought the letter with me to prove that I actually needed to be there) in all but one case this was met with annoyed glances and sarcastic comments. Only one of my teachers actually sympathised with what I was going through, but eventually his patience ran out. Even a teacher who I had looked up to for a while, simply dismissed my reasoning as (and I quote) “a waste of time”. He literally told me that me going to get help for my eating disorder was a waste of time.  Even during a parents evening with my mum, when he voiced how I’d become withdrawn from the subject (the only time a teacher seemed to have picked up on it), and my mum tried to explain how I had things going on behind the scenes, he still dismissed it. Obviously my mental health doesn’t even begin to compete with my education in terms of importance.

The lack of support I received simply, in my opinion, made me worse. I felt even more alone. I had nobody at school I could talk to about what was going on inside my head and this just made me dread school days even more. The longer it went on for, the more sour my mood became towards it and the people there. I remember having countless arguments with the other students, and even my teachers, which lead to the so-called “pastoral care” lady calling me a bitch – yes she genuinely called me a BITCH – to one of my friends. The more disassociated I became with everything and everyone, the more worthless I felt. Eventually I became so brow beaten that I didn’t even feel like I could sit my exams.

All I needed during this time was a chat. All I needed was an ear to listen to my dilemmas. I wasn’t asking for the world, I wasn’t asking for them to go out of their way to make my life easier. I just needed help!