Millie Hardiman struggles to talk about the time she was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and taken to an eating disorder ward, where she contracted norovirus and was woken every half hour to check she was breathing.
Despite entering the mental health hospital with severe stomach pain and nausea, made worse by consuming food or even a sip of water, she was forced to eat and drink.
The ordeal left Millie, then 17, with complex posttraumatic stress disorder, sleep paralysis and worse health. But the most concerning thing was that she didn’t actually have an eating disorder.
After a lifetime of fighting to be heard by doctors –
