NHS services covering eating disorders are so overwhelmed by a post-Covid surge in problems such as anorexia that they are telling people under the age of 19 to rely on charities, their parents or self-help instead.
The services are so threadbare in places that young people struggling to function normally because of their eating disorder have to wait more than a year to start treatment.
The "truly shocking" findings about the help available to young people with often very fragile mental health emerged in a survey of 1,004 family doctors across the UK by the youth mental health charity stem4.
The shortage of beds for children and young people with eating disorders is so serious that some are being sent hundreds of miles from home or to adult psychiatric wards, GPs say.
This story is from the March 23, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the March 23, 2023 edition of The Guardian.
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