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Finally June Sipping green tea in a bookshop café, author and journalist, June Alexander, radiates quiet joy. After spending 49 of her 60 years battling anorexia and bulimia and their accompanying demons, depression and anxiety, June is finally, she says, “95 per cent me and only five per cent illness”. It required, she explains, something of a complete rebuild to get to this point. Now she is merging her passion for writing and the skills learned through a successful 38 year journalism career with a desire to help others trapped in the same prison. The stakes are high – eating disorders are on the increase, including among males, and the mortality rate for chronic anorexia is around 20 per cent. The health and economic costs are also disturbing - bulimia and anorexia are the eighth and tenth leading causes of disease and injury in Australian women aged 18 to 24 (source: www.butterflyfoundation.com.au). But, as June’s life experience vividly illustrates, not only young women fall victim to eating disorders. Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald last July, Christine Morgan, chief executive of Australian eating disorders support organisation, the Butterfly Foundation, said: “There is this misunderstanding that an eating disorder is something that occurs in adolescence and by the time you’re in your 20s it’s all behind you, but unfortunately this is not always the case.” As it was not the case for June. Growing up on a farm in Gippsland in the 1950s and 60s, June developed anorexia in grade six. The illness remained undiagnosed until she was 33 and refused to release its hold until she was 55. As a result, June became estranged from her parents and sister and suffered numerous relationship breakdowns, including divorce from her first husband and father of her four children. Now, as a speaker at eating disorder conferences and author of her memoir, A Girl Called Tim (released on February 1), and two books to help sufferers, their families and medical professionals, she frequently hears from women in their thirties, forties and fifties with anorexia and bulimia and is aware of at least one woman suffering in her seventies. “That’s why early intervention is vital,” she says. “My illness had 20 years to develop. Imagine a lot of balls of knotted wool - that was my mind. The illness thoughts and behaviours were entrenched. There wasn’t much of me left.” It was writing and her children that saved June’s life. Throughout her illness, she kept diaries in order to keep her sanity – they became her friends and confidants and the basis for her memoir. “If it wasn’t for writing I wouldn’t be alive today,” she says quietly. “Writing is wonderfully therapeutic and I’m very lucky I had that passion, because it was not negotiable with my eating disorder. The illness took everything else but that was the five per cent me that I kept.”
44 | Ruby
What June believes can be a life-saver for others is early invention, an essential first step of Family Based Treatment (FBT), the therapy slowly changing the way eating disorders are treated around the world. Also known as the Maudsley technique, named after the hospital in London where it was developed, FBT involves and supports the whole family in the care of those with eating disorders. In 2007, soon after June had achieved remission from her illness (“I had it too long to say I’m cured”) she learnt about FBT and wished it had been available when she was a kid. At the time, June was researching her “literary Everest”, her memoir; but this went on hold for a year while she wrote My Kid is Back – Empowering Parents to Beat Anorexia Nervosa, in collaboration with American-based eating disorders expert, Professor Daniel Le Grange. In this handbook for parents, ten Australian families caring for a child with anorexia graphically and candidly describe their experiences with FBT. “Parents often think it’s their fault their child has an eating disorder and it’s really important to get the message out that parents are not to blame,” June says, and you can hear the last part is said in capital letters. “FBT is a change in the way anorexia is treated, a recognition that it’s a mental illness, not a choice. If your life is medically threatened by your weight you will still be put in hospital and fed through a nasal gastric tube, but the aim of FBT is to keep the child at home where parents can give 24/7 love and care. And you do actually need 24/7 love