Dasha Nicholls
Dasha Nicholls is a leading expert in child and adolescent mental health, particularly eating disorders. After over 20 years at Great Ormond Street Hospital co-leading the National...
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Who are you?
Hi, my name's Dasha Nicholls. I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Ask me about children and young people's eating disorders.
What is an eating disorder?
So eating disorders are a group of mental disorders in which anxieties, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that are associated with eating become problematic. So an example might be when somebody is eating so little that it makes them unwell or stops them being able to function in some way or eating so much without being able to stop. Those are sorts of examples of disordered eating behaviours, but also like all mental disorders, it's really the thoughts and feelings that are central to them. And that depends which eating disorder you're talking about.
Can children get eating disorders?
Some kind of feeding and eating disorders are more common in children such as, for example, ARFID, avoidant, restrictive food intake disorder. We think that's probably more common in children and young adolescents. But the eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, they tend to onset slightly later. However, anorexia nervosa can occur in children probably from about seven upwards as soon as children are able to really articulate the thoughts and fears that are driving their eating behaviour, and those examples of children having anorexia nervosa date back to Victorian times. So that's not a new phenomenon.