Dana The 8-Year-Old Anorexic - Channel 4 Doc
Cutting Edge Documentary On Eating Disorders
Nov 13, 2008
Nowadays girls are surrounded by images of the “ideal” body and how important it is to achieve it. Calorie counting, low fat diets, exercise regimes; size zero appears to be the ultimate goal for a happy life. 80% of 11 – 14-year-olds worry about their body image, and three-quarters of seven-year-olds want to be thinner. But what would prompt an otherwise healthy eight-year-old girl to become so unhappy with her body she decided to literally starve herself?
At first, according to Dana, it was just a matter of eating more healthily. She stopped eating sweets, then junk food, then became vegetarian. She also began exercising obsessively, running up and down stairs, skipping rope, even jumping up and down to burn off calories. When shopping with her mother she would read food labels for calorie and fat content, and was determined to limit herself to 175 calories a day. Then Dana completely stopped eating, and had to be admitted to hospital and fed through an IV drip. She would hold up her arm for up to six hours at a time to stop the liquid getting into her body.
Every Parent's Nightmare
When her weight dropped to three stone, Dana’s parents felt it was time to seek professional help and took her to the Rhodes Farm Clinic, which specializes in treating eating disorders. Originally established to help teenagers, the clinic is now admitting more eight, nine and 10 year olds. The strict regime ensures not eating is not an option, weight gain targets are set, and therapy sessions are used to try and discover the underlying cause of the disorder
Throughout the documentary director Veronica Clifford includes interviews with older patients at the clinic, who are better able to analyze and express their feelings than eight-year-old Dana. A common misconception about anorexia is that sufferers are merely trying to lose weight. 16-year-old Georgie says “People think anorexics are stupid because they do it because they want to be thin. I’d never do this in a million years if I just wanted to be thin. I’d never hurt myself the way I’m doing, I’d never hurt my family the way I’m doing.”
Your Brain Is Taken Over
Pressures at school or at home are often a catalyst for anorexia. If a person feels overwhelmed by external problems they cannot solve, then the one area of their life they have control over is eating. But this focus on food gradually takes over their entire life. Patient Michelle observes “There’s someone who lives in your head but she’s moved the real you out of your brain and just sort of left a tiny bit of it, and she controls your brain and everything you do”.
Will there be a happy ending for Dana? After 12 weeks at the clinic she reached her target weight and was allowed home again, and all her family can do is hope the anorexia will not resurface. Did a TV programme about a weight loss challenge provide the trigger? Was she copying her older sister’s attempts to diet? Mom Sandra will never be sure. “You’re dealing with an eight-year-old child who doesn’t understand herself why it happened, so you’re not going to get answers, you’re not going to get adult conversation out of a child.”
A sensitive, eye-opening documentary, “Dana The 8 Year Old Anorexic” conveys the pain and helplessness of a family trying to cope with something they cannot control, or understand. A welcome return to form for the Cutting Edge series.
