Newsreader Mark Austin says ‘he got it wrong’ with his anorexic daughter Maddy in heartbreaking rows over her illness
He 'failed to grasp' the extent of the illness and coping with her descent into despair was harder than covering warzones
MARK AUSTIN
in his own words
TV newsman Mark Austin has covered global crises and disasters but his toughest job was as a father, coping with his teen daughter’s descent into despair. Here, in his own words, is his story.
I WAS presenting News at Ten each night, trying to concentrate on what I was reading, but in truth thinking only of my daughter Maddy and whether she would survive the night.
Maddy was 18, 5½ stone, down from 9½. Things were bleak.
10
Newsreader Mark Austin on the agony of his teen Maddy's illnessCredit: Sunday Times Magazine
She was there, but she was gone, is the only way I can describe it.
The daughter we loved so much had left us to be replaced by an emaciated, ghostlike figure.
It all happened so quickly. One moment she was a vibrant, strong, energetic and beautiful young girl; the next, she had begun a rapid, dangerous descent towards what seemed, at times, certain death.
10
10 per cent of people with an eating disorder are anorexicCredit: Getty / Posed by model
That’s what anorexia does.
I didn’t understand it at first.
Cancer I understand: diseased cells multiplying, spreading, invading and destroying. But this was my daughter wilfully destroying herself by not eating.
I thought it was crass, insensitive, selfish and pathetic. Until I began to understand. I say “began” to understand deliberately, because even now, five years on, I don’t really understand.
10
Mark with Maddy in 2009 before her illnessCredit: Getty Images
10
Mark spoke out about his daughter's illness on Radio 4
What I do know is that it was swift, sudden and unexpected. I was in America covering the 2012 presidential election when I received the call from my wife, Catherine, an A&E doctor.
She told me how worried she was that Maddy was skipping meals, counting calories and becoming obsessive about the food she would eat. Inevitably, she was also showing signs of weight loss.
By the time I got back to London a week later Maddy had collapsed at school. I took a call from her housemistress, who knew the signs pretty well.
Within days we were sitting in front of an eating-disorder specialist, who confirmed Maddy was in the grip of anorexia.
Maddy cried, insisted there was nothing wrong and that she would start eating. But it got worse.
She stopped looking like a healthy athlete, the promising 800m runner who won national school events and took part in Olympic trials.
10
Maddy suffered from anorexia whle she was taking her A levelsCredit: Twitter / Maddy Austin
Instead, she seemed bent on self-destruction and it broke my heart. The daughter I thought I knew became remote and filled with cunning.
She would lie about how much she had eaten and then explode with rage if we challenged her.
She was abusive, seemingly possessed by demons she could not — or, worse, did not want to — control.
She showered me with contempt. As a father you have to make a decision and I made the wrong one. I decided to go on the attack.
I told her she was being ridiculous. I told her to get a grip and grow up, to “just bloody well eat, for Christ’s sake”.
I drew a parallel to the appalling plight of family friends whose young daughter passed away from leukaemia. “She was desperate to live, but despite all the medical help available, she couldn’t.
"That is a tragedy. But you are doing it to yourself.”
10
Mark Austin says he regrets telling his daughter Maddy to 'get a grip and eat'Credit: Sunday Times Magazine
I even remember saying, “If you really want to starve yourself to death, just get on with it.” And at least once, exasperated and at a loss, I think I actually meant it.
What I failed utterly to grasp was that she was seriously mentally ill and could not see a future for herself.
I found the issues of body image and weight control difficult to talk about. I floundered and, in the process, ended up poisoning her against me further.
All the while, Maddy was shrinking away. She was painfully thin, constantly pale and so cold all the time. Her arms and legs became sticklike, her face gaunt, her eyes hollow. Her body was closing down. We were watching her slowly die. I never imagined for a moment I would write about this.
I write and broadcast for a living. I have covered war, atrocity, famine and natural disasters and am paid to find the words to describe what I witness.
But when a crisis comes crashing headlong into your own family, when the life and death struggle is your own flesh and blood? No thanks. Too close. Too raw. Too exposing. This we keep quiet about.
But the truth is I can’t and won’t keep quiet, because something needs to be done to help the victims of anorexia.
As a country our response is bordering on the pathetic. It is a mental illness, but, almost uniquely, it is one that kills.
Has your family suffered from an eating disorder?
10
BETTER CALL PAUL with Paul Ross today from 9am on 0344 499 1000
Listen on DAB, via the talkRADIO app or online at
Maddy urgently needed rapid, early and significant medical intervention. But what treatment and where?
She wasn’t acutely ill enough to warrant a hospital bed.
At the time, she wasn’t thin enough to trigger admission to a full-time eating-disorder unit and, at 18, she was too old to qualify for child mental-health treatment. Just think about that. Not ill enough. One would have thought that enough was known about the predictable path of anorexia that the most sensible and economically sound response would be quick intervention.
10
Mark Austin's daughter Maddy is now planning to run the marathonCredit: Sunday Times Magazine
The fact is, there are not the resources for that. Maddy’s GP was a lifeline, but the best we got early on were regular outpatient appointments that came and went with no real improvement.
Maddy would say what the specialist wanted to hear, keep her weight just above the level where alarms would sound and then carry on shrinking between appointments.
She started a regime of long early morning walks. Mile after mile she would go. I tried to stop her, but she would get up earlier and earlier. Often walking in darkness, rain or snow.
Abusive and seemingly possessed by demons
Mark AustinNewsreader
Because she was 18, we had no legal power to make her go anywhere for treatment — it was hopeless. If our family, with an A&E doctor and a pushy journalist, starts to crack and fall apart, what hope for other families battling the system? What hope for single parents? What hope for those unable to afford private medical help?
No hope is the answer as it currently stands. It quickly became clear the only option was private in-patient treatment.
The unit did its best, but this was an expensive regime of forced feeding, no exercise, accompanied lavatory visits to prevent them throwing up the food consumed, and monitored sleep to make sure they didn’t exercise while in bed.
It was probably what she needed, but she resisted and threatened to kill herself. There had already been one recent suicide there and we didn’t want another. We brought her home.
My wife was so worried, she took time off work, turned Maddy’s bedroom into an emergency ward and slept on the floor in her room.
Maddy developed bone marrow failure and was covered in sores as her skin was breaking down. Eventually, we found an NHS service at Farnham Hospital that saved her life.
10
Maddy is training to run the marathon to raise money for mental healthCredit: Facebook / Maddy Austin
It was a day patient unit that picked her up by ambulance before breakfast, fed and treated her during the day.
It involved monitored mealtimes, intensive counselling and other therapy. It was tough when it had to be, gentle and cajoling at other times.
It was run by good people who cared. Maddy spent a year there, slowly regaining weight. But afterwards she was left with debilitating depression.
Even though she put weight back on, Maddy didn’t think she would get better. It frightened her. But gradually, she did.
We were lucky to find it and she was lucky to get a place there. And my point is: why are there not more places like it?
Mental-health problems in teenagers is the epidemic of our age, with more than 850,000 children and young people in the UK diagnosed as sufferers.
So often girls, it is overwhelmingly girls, wait months, even years, to get real help. They fall through cracks in an inadequately resourced and financed system. We need walk-in centres on the high street of every town in this country, manned by trained counsellors. We must not let these girls down.
It is reckoned one in five chronic anorexics will die as a result of the condition or because they take their own life.
I’ve asked Maddy what it was that triggered her illness, and she has yet to come up with a satisfactory answer.
I think the truth is there is no one reason. The nearest she has come to an explanation was when she told me she felt her life was out of control and the one thing she could control was the amount of food that entered her body.
Why she felt her life was out of control is the interesting issue. Is the growing use of social media to blame?
Tough when it had to be, cajoling at other times
Mark AustinNewsreader
There must be a link between mental wellbeing and an online world where girls are presented with supposed ideals as to how they should look and live their lives. It is a daily battering of fragile senses and sensitivities. What haunted me, and I imagine haunts most parents of anorexics, was the lurking question of whether we were to blame.
My daughter and the specialists rushed to tell us we were not, but it doesn’t quell the nagging doubts that something we said or did pushed her into this dreadful condition.
Maddy is much improved. Five years on, we have our daughter back. She is healthy, leading a normal life and back at university. Others are not so fortunate.
I have hated writing this, and I thought a thousand times about not doing it. But my hope is that people will read it and say, yes, as a country we should take mental health seriously.
Not to do so would be an unforgivable betrayal of some of the most vulnerable in our society.
— Mark Austin’s fee for this article, which , has been donated to the Place2Be mental health charity, for which Maddy is running the London Marathon.
It's time to take action
10
Mark Austin's daughter Maddy reveals struggle with anorexia in her own wordsCredit: Sunday Times Magazine
HERE is Maddy’s story of her fight with anorexia.
If I close my eyes, I can take myself back to the moment I heard my dad shout at me to “get on with” starving myself to death, as I lay by the oven, clutching two hot water bottles.
I knew I was destroying my family. I’d watched myself shrink and the strongest people in my life begin to crack. In my head, all I wanted was for my parents to forget I ever existed so I could continue down my path of slow suicide.
I was an athlete, a straight-A* student and there was little that I hadn’t excelled at throughout my teenage years but somewhere deep inside I was convinced I was not good enough.
It was this feeling that made it so hard to overcome anorexia, that made me feel I didn’t deserve to recover.
Eventually it was a local NHS day-patient unit that saved my life.
I had a key nurse who really understood me and saw the Maddy without the demons.
She made me realise that inside me was still laughter and joy. I was lucky, but mental-health treatment should not be a lottery. The kind of unit that eventually helped me is all too rare. Things need to change and now is the time for action.
Otherwise it will be too late.
— MADDY will run the London Marathon on April 23, for children’s mental-health charity Place2Be, as part of Heads Together. That is a campaign fronted by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry that aims to change the conversation on mental health from fear and shame to one of confidence and support.
To sponsor her, search “Maddy Austin” on .
Facts and figures
— An estimated20% - 40% of deaths of anorexics are suicides
— 46% of anorexics who survive suicide bid recover fully, 33% improve, 21% stay ill
— 10% of people with an eating disorder are anorexic
— 1.6million people with an eating disorder are anorexic
— 89% of that 1.6million are female
— The average age a woman develops anorexia is 16-17
— 14-25 year-olds are most affected by an eating disorder
— 1,815 teens were admitted to hospital with the condition in 2013-14
10
