Tyler has always been a natural at sport but never really had that typical sporty demeanour. He is quiet, shy and not at all brash about his capabilities. He has played at the top level in Australia, representing his state on a number of occasions.
Sport has been everything for Tyler and he hopes to turn pro. He is entirely focused on developing himself with that goal in mind. He is something of a perfectionist and wants to do everything right. He rarely gets injured, never misses training and has an amazing diet. He hasn’t eaten sugar since the age of about 9. When he’s not thinking about sport, he is doing his schoolwork and was top at everything right through school up to year 11.
Routine and predictability are his favourite things. COVID came and decimated kids sport for a year or more. Tyler adjusted to it: went out by himself and did running programs, conditioning programs and sometime during this period started to focus more on his food.
The first signs of a problem looked like a teenager taking more interest in their health: eating more vegetables and eating lean meat. Looking up recipes to get a balance of nutrients. What came with that was an unrelenting focus to the exclusion of other things – dinner with friends, impromptu pizza nights and long car trips needed to be planned to the minute around food stops with pre-made food as he refused to eat out.
Even then I just thought he was being a painful teenager and maybe secretly admired his dedication as I peered over the beginnings of my midlife paunch.
As we came out of COVID and sports started up again he dedicated more and more of his time to the sport he loved. 5:30am starts to consume a power-breakfast prior to training. We then noticed his meal portions start to reduce. He said he thought he was getting fat, so wanted to entirely remove fat from his diet. He weighed himself multiple times a day. He complained of a bloated stomach – lifting his t-shirt to show us his flat six pack “See, look how much that sticks out!”.
Along with this started to come feelings of self-doubt. He thought he was shit and most answers to any questions were “It’s shit”.
I tried communicating with Tyler, as any loving parent would. It was fairly obvious to me Tyler was not shit. I questioned his sanity about his protruding stomach. I tried to present a logical argument as to why he should eat more to gain weight, to increase muscle mass to get bigger and better at his game. None of this stuck.
At first I thought he would benefit from seeing a sports psychologist. I reached out to his club and they had nothing. So then I reached out to google; she came up with a young sports psychologist in the same sports field as Tyler. I figured that would be a perfect match with someone that would understand the pressures of the game.
I set up the first sessions with a phone call, but then left them to it. I really wanted Tyler to open up and feel he could talk to this person without sharing the sessions with his parents. Those sessions seem like a distant blur now. They made no perceivable impact.
I’m now a good 6 months after thinking there might be a problem and things are only getting worse. I started to think maybe he needs specialist clinical help, but where do I start?
Our GP seemed like a good place to start. Get ourselves a mental health plan I thought. I went with Tyler to the GP and his assessment was that he saw a wonderful young boy who was following a healthy lifestyle and didn’t need a referral. That’s a pretty good assessment of the situation we found ourselves in. On the outside, an amazing boy with everything going for him: talent, good looks, sporty, smart – what more did we want? That leads to a whole other essay about your own self-doubt as a parent!
We didn’t act quickly enough following this encounter with the GP. We left it some more weeks, we tried a telehealth appointment with another doctor which didn’t go well and finally managed to get another doctor at our usual practice to agree to a mental health referral. Even then the GP was somewhat reluctant as Tyler’s depression scores were low. Now, with a referral in place we were able to get Tyler infant of a clinical psychologist and his first assessment was that Tyler has anorexia.
As I get to the end of this essay, I’m only now just beginning to think about what I wanted to share. I’ve just been writing words on a page and as I re-read them they bring me so much sadness and feelings of failure about myself that we didn’t act sooner. At the beginning things didn’t seem so bad, we might be able to patch things up and then we see a glimmer of hope, or what we think is; or maybe it’s just the way the sun shines that day. Then you have medical people telling you there is nothing wrong!
As a parent we know our child better than anyone, as a father we have great insight and instinct in to the minds of boys. We have to go with our instincts and seek help. I didn’t do that soon enough. Getting help was not easy, we had advice from friends to seek help and yet we encountered failures and blockages from professionals along the way. I wish I had been stronger to keep pushing for help much earlier. I cant really offer any concrete advice other than to take the early signs of issues seriously, they are unlikely to get better by seeing how they go.
Anonymous for The Village Northern Beaches
