I would like to begin by thanking you for having me today, as well. It's truly an honour for me to be here. I also want to thank you for conducting a study on eating disorders. This is a very important issue.
For 14 years, I have been the Executive Director of an organization called Anorexia and bulimia Quebec, or ANEB. This is a not-for-profit organization that provides services to individuals with an eating disorder and their families, across Quebec.
Our organization guarantees free, ad hoc and specialized assistance to individuals suffering from eating disorders, and to their loved ones. We provide a help and referral phone line, prevention activities and professional training. Over the past 14 years, I have seen time and time again how important community resources like ANEB are in the continuum of supportive services for individuals suffering from eating disorders.
Eating disorders are very worrisome public health problems in terms of their rising prevalence, but also in terms of their various manifestations, which are largely unknown and often go unnoticed. Those include anorexia, binge-eating disorder and muscle dysmorphia.
These eating disorders, as you have probably heard from many witnesses who came before me, have numerous psychological and physiological repercussions on the person suffering from them. If left untreated, the disorders may result in death. Unfortunately, these types of situations have occurred in recent years.
Despite this extremely alarming state of affairs, there are very few resources specializing in eating disorders in Quebec. The limited resources that do exist are in the public domain. The number of hospital beds available for individuals with eating disorders is very low—about 10 to 12 beds throughout Quebec.
For adults, it takes a very long time to obtain specialized third-line services for eating disorders. People can wait for months, even a year or sometimes longer, depending on the seriousness of their eating disorders. For people in distress, a few days is a long time. You can imagine what a few months, even a year, can be like. The resources available to people suffering from this disease are clearly insufficient.
Faced with those kinds of wait times, some people decide to turn to private resources for specialized assistance. However, those resources can also have considerably long waiting lists and charge a lot of money for their services. So that is not an option for most people suffering from eating disorders.
When it comes to treatment for eating disorders in Quebec, it may sometimes seem that we have a two-tier health care system. We have the private and the public systems. Currently, in Quebec, a number of public resource professionals are trying to compensate for that shortage in order to meet the demand. However, the sad reality is that few professionals know enough about those disorders to be able to respond effectively.
There is another major issue that should be pointed out. Most of the care available is concentrated in large urban centres. People living in the regions have few resources, and often feel isolated and misunderstood. They also feel like that they are the only ones with these kinds of problems.
We know that the number of individuals with an eating disorder will increase—and they will be younger and younger—and that the physical and psychological consequences are serious. There is an increasingly urgent need for action.
All my years with ANEB have made me see that much of the stigma around the illness has persisted. People still often say that all someone has to do is eat, that their disorder is just a whim, that eating disorders affect only girls, that an individual is not anorexic because they are not thin enough, and I could go on.
This lack of understanding of the disease and the misconceptions about it are sometimes even found among health care professionals who are not trained or informed regarding this issue. Patients are sent home if they are not thin enough because, according to the health care personnel, they are not exhibiting clear physical signs associated with undernutrition. Believe it or not, we are still seeing this in 2014.
In addition to the many persisting prejudices, the illness is still taboo, even in 2014. Those people are ashamed to seek help. They are afraid of being judged. The disease is more taboo among men.
What about loved ones and friends? Family members of affected individuals are often resourceless and powerless in the face of the disease. They feel that they lack information about the illness and about the treatment, and that they have little support in their suffering. They do not feel equipped to help their loved one.
Last year, over 750 family members of individuals with an eating disorder called the ANEB phone help line to seek assistance, and over 300 individuals turned to support groups for accurate information.
Following this reflection, we have a few recommendations for the committee.
It would be important to improve accessibility to specialized support services in the community in order to ensure appropriate and quick assistance for individuals waiting for support, but also after treatment.
It would also be important to consolidate the funding of organizations working with this clientele, so that energy can be invested into developing assistance, instead of into looking for funding. That's often what community organizations have to focus on.
In addition, it would be important to increase the number of awareness and information campaigns targeting the illness. More interest in this issue would go a long way in helping reduce the discrimination and stigma people with an eating disorder experience. It would also be a good idea to find known public figures who have suffered from an eating disorder and who would agree to talk about their experience with the disease.
It would be essential to make training programs more accessible to various professionals, so that they could identify eating disorders more quickly and effectively. That training should target far more professionals, as many of them are likely to deal with such cases. I am not talking about only health care professionals, but also professionals working in schools and sports coaches. That number should be increased as much as possible.
It would also be important to provide professionals with more tools, so that they can respond more effectively and appropriately to clients. This would really help reduce waiting lists for third-line services and provide services in the community.
The use of prevention programs in school should be more prevalent. Those programs would be based on research evidence. In addition, peer helpers should be trained to identify young people in schools.
That concludes my presentation. I hope this information will help you in your study on eating disorders among girls and women.
Thank you for listening.