Heather

Heather has a psychosocial disability. In the mid-2010s she spent almost a year as an involuntary treatment patient in an eating disorders clinic. She told the Royal Commission her treatment by medical staff was ‘without dignity or respect’ and she believes the abuse and neglect was systemic.

One time when she was in intensive care a nurse refused to speak to her other than to say that her bed ‘would be better used by someone with “real health issues”’.

When Heather was transferred to the clinic she felt intimidated by the number of people present during her first treatment meeting. She was confused, and unsure what it meant to be an involuntary treatment patient. The head doctor asked if she realised she was unwell. Heather said she wasn’t sure. Then in front of more than 10 medical professionals, the doctor yelled, ‘You look disgusting. Haven’t you looked in a mirror? You look like a prisoner of war.’

At the clinic there was ‘a predatory male night shift nurse’ who would routinely come into her room and give her ‘bear hugs’ before she went to sleep. The nurse would lean over her and hug her for minutes at a time. She was on her back, her arms pinned under the blankets as he pressed against her.

The eating disorder patients spent their day all together in a small lounge room. One time, the senior nurse stormed in and proceeded to shout at them telling each patient what she thought of them. She told one girl, ‘you need to stop throwing up all the time’ and another ‘and you need to stop exercising in your room’. She eventually got to Heather and told her she ‘was the rudest girl she had ever met in her life’. She finished her spray saying Heather needed to pull herself together and that she was ‘a nasty, mean and horrible person’. Then she slammed the door and stormed off.

It was difficult for everyone to have details of their illnesses shared around.

Not long after this one of the inpatients died. Heather says they were all quite close ‘given we had to spend so long together confined to a single room’. No counselling was offered to anyone following her death. Instead the nurses used her death as a cautionary tale, telling us ‘if we didn’t decide to get better’ it would happen to us.

Heather acknowledges the clinic played an important role in her recovery, but she believes the practice of re-feeding was problematic. Staff fed patients through a tube against their will and were ‘not given ANY mental health support during their treatment’.

‘As a patient who was there for two four-month stays, I was returned to a healthy weight, but had no psychological help during this time. It was very difficult to be force fed back to a healthy weight but have no treatment for what was going on … inside. Especially in the context of being confined to a bed and unable to go outside or go to the toilet by myself. The terrible treatment of patients by staff made the entire process much more difficult.’

Heather says anorexia nervosa has the highest death rate of all psychosocial illnesses and is a disability. She would like nurses better trained ‘and have compulsory ongoing training’ when they are working with patients with a disability. She also believes mental health professionals should be employed at all eating disorder clinics.

‘Just because people may have disabilities it doesn't make them any less human or deserving of kindness, dignity, and respect.’