“I believe, mother, that after all thirteen years are enough to have lived” my daughter Maria Beatrice told me exactly like this one autumn evening in 2020. While she pronounced those words, which froze my heart, she was calm, calm, lucid. Her gaze was far away. She looked at me but it was as if she didn’t see me. It was a gaze that wouldn’t leave her for a long time when, when the first symptoms of anorexia nervosa appeared, my husband and I we had desperately looked for competent professionals to rely on, between the first and second waves of Covid-19. The evening in which Maria Beatrice spoke those words, we had just entered a spiral that would take us, in a very short period of time, directly to the world. ‘Hell, a hell that not even in the worst of nightmares we could have imagined and which would soon see her one step away from death three times.
In Italy, anorexia is the first cause of death among young people, after road accidents. One in three people suffers from eating and nutrition disorders (DAN); 70% are pre-adolescents and adolescents. Anorexia represents 8% of DAN, but it is the one that generates the most deaths. The main cause is suicide.
As reported by Dr. Leonardo Mendolicchio, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, author of the preface of If love was enough, director of the DAN Rehabilitation department of the Auxologico of Piancavallo, anorexia has a very high mortality rate, but paradoxically also a very high percentage of healing. The determining factor is that treatment begins within two years of onset and that the anorexia has not become chronic. The age of onset has dropped to 8 years, with cases of even younger ages, so much so that in 2022 Doctor Mendolicchio opened the doors of Auxologico to patients of developmental age who represent 30% of hospitalization requests . The patients come from pediatrics across Italy.
Access to care, which is so crucial, is not immediate, to put it mildly. In Italy at the moment there are 135 dedicated facilities and less than half take care of patients under 14 years of age. So what about pre-adolescents suffering from anorexia nervosa? Those who are one step away from death, but are sent home from the emergency room, what can they do? This happened to us the first time, after endless begging for months for a bed anywhere as long as Maria Beatrice was treated. And it happened in a cutting-edge city, in an excellent hospital. The second time, two days later, one step away from death, she was accepted and then admitted to Child Neuropsychiatry which is not, however, where patients suffering from DAN should be treated. How long will it take for the National Health System to catch up? How many more victims?
Writing If love was enough, narrating the journey I experienced alongside my daughter, with the decisive support of my family, was to bear witness to something that is unimaginable from the outside. I did it through temporal stages, on a journey that metaphorically goes from the rapid fall into Hell to the very slow ascent towards the light of Paradise, describing a posteriori, rationally and without discounts for anyone, least of all for myself, the contributing causes that had shared in the onset of anorexia, the symptoms, the attitudes, as well as our relationships and family dynamics, the difficulty in accessing treatment first and then the extreme complexity of interacting with my daughter when her mind was now completely dominated from the monster of anorexia. I found myself living with three people, locked in a room 24 hours a day: her, me and the monster.
Maria Beatrice was very serious, she weighed just over 30 kilos. Nonetheless, she would not and could not stop her perpetual movement. This compulsive behavior did not allow her to sit, marching in place, even with her feet now destroyed. I saw her body dry up like a sapless leaf, covered in anorectic fluff that served to provide her with some heat in a desperate attempt to save her while her organs began to fail. I saw her hug again, without emotion, in the room of the second hospitalization, months after the last meeting, her little sister, to whom she had always been very close and once she had left again, intent on marching on the spot, telling me: «Mom, I I no longer feel anything for Adelaide.” Adelaide then wrote in her diary: «Seeing my sister who is three and a half years older than me, become like a little child, surrounded by Stitch soft toys, with the feeding tube that enters her body and fixed to her nose and on her pajamas with white adhesive tape, the water drip with the needle in the arm, the floor lamp that is pulled with every step and that blank, emotionless look, shocks and hurts me. Anorexia ate my sister and her mind, day after day. Anorexia changes you and destroys you.”
In If love was enough I described in detail, through the words of Maria Beatrice, mine and those of my mother, how that monster acted, what he forced her to do, and thus illustrated the precarious balance of her mind in the balance, even when he seemed to be better, between the desire to disappear and the desire to fight to live. I decided that I would write it two summers ago, six months after leaving the last hospital stay, when, although still very struggling with food and underweight, Maria Beatrice had consciously resumed her life’s path. I was driving and, after the first weekend with both my daughters, the first time in a very long time, I had the opportunity to reflect on how privileged we were. I thought about those girls I had met in hospitals who hadn’t made it and about their families. Part of that unbearable pain will forever be mine too. I wrote the book to be able to give a testimony of hope to those who today are fighting against this invisible monster which undermines not only the life of the person who suffers from it, but of all their family members. To show gratitude towards the medical and healthcare staff and for those who, along our journey, supported me and participated in saving my daughter. And last but not least, I wrote it for all those mothers, desperate, lost, heartbroken who, despite this, every day, throughout Italy, fight with all the strength possible to be able to have their daughter treated and often do so in the face of external indifference. and with the lacerating weight of social stigma, as antiquated as it is absurd and unacceptable, which identifies them as the one and only cause of their daughter’s anorexia. I wrote it with the hope that it will be useful. Fighting for the right to mental health protection is a moral duty for me, especially for those who have not made it and for those who do not have a voice to be able to do so.
*Author of «If love was enough» (Piemme)
