Determination, Love and Mushrooms
A Story About Recovery From Anorexia
Disclaimer: This is the story from the perspective of a mom whose daughter battled a severe Eating Disorder for 5 years. In this blog post, identifying information has been adjusted to protect confidentiality. This blog post comes with a trigger warning, including topics such as eating disorders, suicide, self-harm, restriction and other eating disorder behaviours.
Determination, Love and Mushrooms
My daughter, who we will call Kate for the purposes of this post, had always been such a gregarious child. She was social, carefree and energetic. In early 2019, I started noticing anxiety and self-consciousness that we had never seen before. In late 2019, she started complaining of stomach aches, nausea and bloating. She was a pre-pubescent girl; we had moved towns, and she had started a new school with all new friends. I thought this could be nerves or hormone changes, but we decided to get some testing done to rule out anything more serious. It turned out that she had celiac disease, an illness caused by an immune reaction to eating gluten. The symptoms our daughter was experiencing were in keeping with those experienced by people with Celiac who consume gluten, so we eliminated gluten from her diet immediately. Our family was familiar with anxiety; our oldest daughter has suffered from anxiety, a tic disorder and anorexia nervosa throughout her middle school years. Although Celiac disease is a terrible nuisance and health risk for those who have it, and it would be a big change in our house when it came to meals, I was grateful to have an answer and grateful that we weren’t up against anorexia this time. It was manageable.
In the spring of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, I was certain that our Kate wasn’t just dealing with Celiac. We’d eliminated gluten, and the symptoms were not going away. I knew she was developing an eating disorder. On May 20th, I emailed our pediatrician and stated the following. “Kate is experiencing extreme sadness, very little appetite, stomach discomfort, nausea, constipation, body aches/pains and fatigue. It has been worsening over the past 8 weeks.” Given the Covid lockdowns, we could not see the doctor in person but after a virtual appointment, she referred Kate to our local eating disorder outpatient clinic at Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH). We felt so hopeful and so afraid in the same breath, but at least we were going to get help before things got out of control. We caught it early, and we were going to get help before our daughter’s life was in danger.
For the next 13 months, while supporting our Kate’s mental and physical health through Covid lockdowns, virtual school and limited social interaction, we waited for her assessment date to be scheduled so she could receive a formal diagnosis and appropriate treatment. In June of 2021, Kate’s weight had dropped significantly, and her symptoms worsened. She had also begun to self-harm. We made an appointment with our family doctor to ensure she was medically stable and attempted to expedite our referral to the Eating Disorder Program.
On June 21st, I sat with Kate and her family doctor to explain how she had been feeling, what we believed she was dealing with and what we needed his help with. We also wanted to make sure that she was medically stable enough to go to sleep-over camp two weeks later. He weighed her, took her vitals and then asked her to leave the office so he could speak to me alone. When Kate had left the room, the doctor said this to me; “I need to caution you against over-medicalizing your daughter. Her vitals are fine, and her weight is low but not too low. I suggest you send her to camp and let her be a kid.”.
I left feeling completely unseen and unsupported and maybe a little neurotic. Is it possible that I was making this a bigger deal than it is?
Ironically, we received a call to meet with the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) psychiatrist the following week. We were back on track. We met the psychiatrist on June 29th, and our daughter was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and restrictive anorexia. We were advised not to send Kate to camp unless she could maintain her weight, and we felt that she could manage her own nutrition while away from home. Sleepover camp was scheduled to begin two weeks later. We felt confident that we could get Kate’s weight up a bit, and she would be able to go to camp and ‘be a kid’! Those two weeks were hell.
The pressure Kate felt to gain weight so that it was ‘safe’ to go to camp set her eating disorder on high alert. Every meal was so hard. She was scared to eat, and I was afraid that she wouldn’t eat. Her anger was unlike I’d ever experienced before. When things felt like too much, she would run. One day, she locked herself in our main floor bathroom, jumped out the window and disappeared into the forest beside our home for hours. I called the OPP to ask for help, and they said they could come, and if they were able to find her, she’d be taken to Penetanguishene for assessment and potential admission to the mental hospital. I knew this wasn’t a pediatric facility and it wasn’t a facility set up to treat eating disorders. It was also a hospital for adults.
This was a solution that was sure to cause more harm than good. It wasn’t an option. Kate eventually returned home after taking the time she needed to calm herself, and we talked things through. She ate her meal, and we all felt better. The forest had calmed her. She needed space and nature. We decided that camp would be a good idea, and the next day, we drove her to camp, 3 1/2 hours away and left her there to ‘be a kid’. Four days later, we were called to pick her up. She was not able to eat without our guidance. She was dizzy, weak and scared. She had blacked out several times and couldn’t participate because she had no energy. We took her to the emergency clinic at Royal Victoria Hospital on the way home from camp, and she was admitted and put on bed rest for the next 28 days. This meant that she was so malnourished that she was at risk of bradycardia; heart failure. She needed to be fed with precision so that she didn’t suffer re-feeding syndrome. Re-feeding syndrome can happen when somebody who has been starving themselves begins eating again. When the body tries to metabolize nutrients again, severe shifts can occur in the body’s chemistry, leading to dangerous complications, affecting your muscles, lungs, heart and brain. Once our daughter had achieved medical stability, we were sent home to manage her recovery with the support of the eating disorder team. She was finally sick enough for us to get help.
Each week, we travelled an hour to Barrie to the Eating Disorder Clinic at RVH. Kate was weighed, had her vitals checked, did bloodwork, met with the nurse practitioner and was scheduled to speak to the social worker for an hour. There were weeks when she refused to get in the car to go. There were other times when she refused to speak to the social worker once we arrived. Although the hospital had helped her gain medical stability, they did nothing to treat her eating disorder; they didn’t seem to understand how to treat it. She was now living with an eating disorder and going through the motions to make sure she never had to give it up – she felt she needed it to survive. The Eating Disorder team was nothing but a nuisance to her.
It was July of 2022, and things looked different. Our daughter seemed happy and looked healthier. She was definitely too thin but did not look ‘sick’ per se. She was willingly eating everything I gave her and often took more. She wasn’t exercising, and we saw no evidence of cutting. She seemed better in some ways, but something wasn’t adding up.
Since February, she has been losing weight consistently. Could something else be at play now? The only thing I could think of was that she was purging. We were going through granola bars and protein bars like crazy; there were wrappers everywhere. On the surface, she was loving food. She was excited about meals and ice cream. I didn’t know what to do, but I no longer had a support team at Royal Vic to ask. They discharged our very sick child from their program because she wouldn’t talk to their social worker each week. She was “non-compliant,” so she had to figure it out on her own.
School began on September 6th, 2022, and Kate was hospitalized again at RVH on September 9th. My suspicions were right; things were not adding up. She was purging everything she ate. She was vomiting so frequently that she blew a blood vessel in her nose, causing it to hemorrhage clots for hours. Again, she was put on bedrest, this time for 3 weeks. While in the hospital, she managed to purge regularly, hide her food, and self-harm. She threw yogurt at a nurse’s head and tried to escape her locked pediatric ward. She was released once she was medically stable so we could get back to keeping her alive while living with an eating disorder. Thankfully, this time, we were referred to a day treatment program at a hospital in Toronto, but we would have to wait nearly two months before she could start. Accepting a placement in this program meant that we had to rent an apartment in Toronto and live there until the program was complete so that is what we did. We lived in Toronto from November until February 2022, Monday to Friday so that Kate could finally get intensive treatment for her eating disorder, two and a half years after she truly needed it.
Our oldest daughter had received intensive inpatient treatment for her eating disorder at an intensive program and was now in remission and thriving. It was a horrific experience for her and our family. She spent 47 days in a locked mental health ward, but she was now well, so what choice did we have but to try something similar for Kate?
We would drop Kate off at the hospital every morning at 9 am and pick her up at 4 pm. She would essentially spend her day either eating or refusing to eat and crying while having her every move supervised. Plates and fingers would be licked to ensure that zero restriction was allowed. Meals that were refused or thrown against a wall were replaced with Ensure. Going to the bathroom required full supervision. Phones were locked away with all personal possessions, and you had to show up on time without fail. In between eating, if time allowed, there was group work and school. It was gruelling and regimented and void of warmth.
Every evening, she came home to us and we were responsible for supporting her through dinner and an evening snack. It was our responsibility to make sure she ate and did not purge. It was so hard for all of us. So scary for her and so cruel for all of us to live through the belligerence that came with the fear and rage of the eating disorder, and her remorse for treating us so poorly day after day. My favourite part of the day was when all eating was done and we could rest, usually snuggled up together watching the Gilmour Girls or The Office. Making it through the day was a family affair. Kate left the day treatment program at the beginning of the second semester of school. She had missed so much school and wanted to start her semester with her peers. We returned to our home and did our best to keep her healthy and working towards full recovery.
Although healthier, the eating disorder was still at play, and Kate’s anxiety was not well managed. The medication just wasn’t working. Most days, I would receive a text from her at school saying that she was in the bathroom crying or having a panic attack and couldn’t breathe. She begged me to pick her up.
At that point, we were driving over an hour each week for Kate to talk to her therapist, who she loves and trusts and Midland once each month to see the Psychiatrist. My husband or I would sit with her for every meal, and we were doing our best to supervise her after meals. Her legs were covered in tiny, perfectly straight slices, seemingly hundreds of them. The cuts seemed to get bigger and deeper, sometimes taking days to stop bleeding. We were still stuck in the hell of all of this.
Kate had tried so many different medications, she was getting fresh air, was doing her best to be social, she was trying to stay on top of her school work but it was all still so hard. We were all lost, defeated, tired and overwhelmed.
On December 4th, 2023, Kate came to see me in our bedroom. She was in tears. I sat on the floor, and she crawled into my lap. She told me that she had just flushed a handful of pills down the toilet that she had intended to take before she went to sleep. She didn’t want to wake up the next morning. She told me that she had tried to kill herself with pills twice before and knew that she would have been successful this time. I had no idea. How did I not know how dark and overwhelming living was for her?
My husband was away, and I didn’t know what to do, so I held her and called 911. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t going to brush this off – she needed help, and I was going to get it for her. The police came to our house, and I was forced to take her to the hospital to have her seen by a doctor. The problem was they would only allow us to go to the hospital that the ambulance was dispatched from when I called 911!
We had to drive to a hospital that had no psychiatric support, 30 minutes away! I had to take my daughter with an eating disorder and celiac disease, who had just asked for help because she no longer wanted to live, to a hospital that could do nothing for her, not even feed her safely. Once the OPP left, we asked the triage nurse if we could go home, and she looked at Kate and sai,d “Are you going to kill yourself tonight?”. She said “No,” and we were allowed to leave.
Kate and I moved into the same bedroom and were inseparable for the next two months. She was never left alone. She had decided that she wanted to get well. She knew I would die if she killed herself. She had to stay alive for us. We agreed upon a list of very strict rules that all of us would follow to keep her safe. This included fully supervised meals, no running away at meal time, fully supervised bathroom visits, no flushing, weekly trips to her therapist, going to school every day, no name calling or physical violence and full meal replacement if purging is suspected.
Little by little, Kate re-nourished her body and was reminded of how good it feels to have energy and a clearer mind. Her anxiety improved, and panic attacks were less frequent. She started tracking her sobriety from self-harm and purging and, in time, saw that she was slowly winning this battle.
She started a new school in February of 2024. The change of school, plus new friends and a supportive environment, helped her get to school more frequently. Things were going in the right direction, but Kate’s depression was still intense and debilitating. She thought about dying every day, and she still had a plan. She did not remember what it felt like to be happy. Her eating disorder was still very much in her life, and her anxiety, although managed, was still stopping her from living a normal teenage life. We were working at overcoming food rules and tolerating the sounds of crinkling packaging every day. Kate was working on managing her anxiety so that it didn’t always escalate into a panic attack. So much work every day, and the depression did not budge.
We were all so tired and sad. Our family had gone years without pure joy. All we did was worry and eat and wonder when it would ever be easier. We felt broken and stuck. Kate deserved to be a kid. She deserved to live without being sick. She deserved to feel happy and free. Her sisters deserved a more carefree existence; we all did.
The medical system continued recommending the same thing. Weight restoration and medication. After all this time, we were desperate and began looking for something alternative to help Kate get out of this unbearable valley of depression, anxiety and destruction. We’d heard that therapeutic psilocybin had been proven to be very successful in treating drug-resistant depression and eating disorders. While there were some risks to this experimental treatment, the benefits outweighed the risks for us, and Kate was willing to try anything; she had fully surrendered to our care, so we had to pull through for her.
We found a highly recommended and reputable individual who was trained in administering psychedelic medicine and supporting Kate through a therapeutic journey. We felt so confident that this was the answer, it had to be.
Kate has undergone two therapeutic psilocybin journeys. The first one was in February of 2024. Before her first journey, Kate’s depression was debilitating, and her existence was codependence with us. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being severely depressed, she reported being consistently an 8 or 9. She was not able to eat without being served, prompted and coached. She was unable to open wrappers of food because of the visceral revulsion she felt in doing so. She did not feel joy and couldn’t remember what it felt like to ever be happy. After her first psilocybin journey, Kate told me she felt truly happy for the first time in as long as she could remember. The feeling of true happiness came back to her in her journey. She reported that she still felt depressed, but it was a 5 out of 10. It never worsened after that day. When we returned home, Kate reached for a granola bar that was resting on the counter, opened it and ate it without hesitation. A couple of days later, she moved herself back into her own room. These changes were surreal. Her brain was allowing her to behave more normally; it had been rewired.
Kate returned for a second psilocybin journey in April 2024. This treatment was harder for her. She was very restless and wanted it to be over before it was time. It was a different mushroom strain, and the experience wasn’t as joyous; it was more intense and heavier. We left the therapist’s office sooner than I expected we would, and I was disappointed. Maybe I had pushed for too much this time. I felt badly that I had encouraged her to do another journey and that it caused her discomfort. A couple of days after her second journey, we noticed that she was brighter, she was more like herself. I asked her where her depression was on a scale of 1 to 10, and she said 2!! There has been nothing but continued improvement since this day.
Kate’s second journey was 9 months ago, and her eating disorder is in remission. She eats freely and intuitively and maintains a healthy weight. She no longer self-harms and has no feelings of depression. Although her anxiety worsens in stressful times, she is able to manage it with very healthy coping strategies. She is attending school, is rarely absent, and has caught up on all of the credits she missed while hospitalized and sick. She has also applied to attend university in the fall (and live away from home), and we feel confident that she can handle it. She has a part-time job and a beautiful friend group, and our family is back to having fun and finding joy in life. We never could have imagined this was possible a year ago. Kate’s battle with anorexia, anxiety and depression started more than 5 years ago – her depression either would have killed her or kept her coping in destructive ways; it was all she knew after being sick for so long. Psilocybin allowed her to see inside her heart and soul and pushed away the lies and darkness of her mental illness for a brief moment so that she could see and feel what was possible. Her determination, our family’s unconditional love and psilocybin have set us free.

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