Eating disorders are where most of my clinical life has been spent. My doctorate at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology, and to my knowledge it remains the only European doctoral research focused on that subject from that angle.
I work with clients across Ireland online, by secure video.
The number that explains why people look outside the system
The HSE’s own projection, published with its Model of Care in 2018, estimated that around 188,895 people in Ireland will experience an eating disorder at some point in their lives, with roughly 1,757 new cases each year in the ten to forty-nine age group.
Ireland currently has three public inpatient beds offering specialist eating disorder treatment. Three, for the entire country.
The Model of Care set out a plan for twenty additional beds between 2018 and 2023. No funding was provided for them. The most recent assessment puts the shortfall at twenty-three adult beds.
I want to be careful about how that is read. It is not a criticism of Irish clinicians. The people working in Irish eating disorder services are doing serious work inside a funding reality they did not create, and some of them are excellent. It does mean that if you are an adult in Ireland who needs specialist help, the public route may involve a wait that your illness does not respect, and that is the practical situation rather than an argument.
You do not have to be thin enough to deserve treatment
This is the belief I meet most often, and it keeps people out of treatment for years.
Eating disorders are not diagnosed by weight. Someone at a perfectly ordinary weight can be extremely unwell, and often is. If you are organising your day around food, or around not eating, or around compensating for having eaten, that is the disorder, whatever the scales say.
The same applies to how long it has gone on. People arrive apologising for having managed it for fifteen years, as though duration were a disqualification. It is usually the reason to start.
Where an eating disorder is not travelling alone
This is what I do that is genuinely harder to find.
Eating disorders, addiction and trauma are usually one psychological profile presenting in three directions rather than three separate conditions. Someone comes about their drinking and there is a relationship with food underneath that nobody has asked about. Someone comes about food and there is something that happened long before it started.
Ireland has good clinicians working on each of those. If you arrive with the whole of it, you will struggle to find one person who can follow you through all of it. That combination is my specialism: complex presentations, complex PTSD, where addiction and an eating disorder sit in the same person.
Men
Male eating disorders were the subject of my doctoral research, and they remain the area where the gap between need and provision is widest. Men are missed, diagnosed late, and frequently assessed with instruments designed around women’s presentations.
If you are a man reading this and wondering whether what you have counts, it counts.
How the work is done
I am an integrative practitioner, which means the method follows the person rather than the other way round. With eating disorders I work with art and creativity alongside talking, because the image arrives before the explanation and reaches what words have learned to defend. Jungian thought sits underneath it.
Some of the work is practical and close to the surface, particularly at the beginning, when a behaviour has to loosen its grip before anything else is possible. Some is about the patterns underneath. For some people it becomes a question about meaning.
What I will tell you at the assessment
If you need a medical team rather than a psychotherapist, or in addition to one, I will say so. There is a physical reality to an eating disorder that comes before psychological work, and no amount of insight substitutes for it. If you need inpatient care, I will say that too, even though I know what the Irish provision looks like.
I would rather tell you that at the start than six sessions in.
Anonymity
Ireland is a small island and everybody knows everybody. If you see a therapist in Dublin, there is a reasonable chance they know somebody you know. For an illness that most people have kept private for years, that is not a small consideration. I have written about why that matters, and what taught me the lesson, on the EMDR page.
Practicalities
Sessions are online by secure video, from anywhere in Ireland.
I am a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. Registration can be verified on the UKCP register.
If you are in crisis in Ireland, Pieta is free and open twenty four hours on 1800 247 247, or text HELP to 51444. Samaritans is free on 116 123, day or night. In an emergency call 112 or 999. Bodywhys, the Irish eating disorders association, runs a national helpline on 01 210 7906.
Statistics on this page come from the HSE Eating Disorder Services Model of Care and subsequent reporting on its implementation. This page is for information and does not replace assessment or treatment.
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