“I’m a fifty year old bloke and I wasn’t brought up to talk about my feelings.”
Dean Bourne is a peer support worker with Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s Eating Disorder Service, where he uses his experience of living with an eating disorder to help others through their treatment.
His new role is quite the departure following a career in IT, but it provides Dean the chance to use his experiences in a positive way to help others. Dean is also happy to talk about his experiences to encourage others to open up about their struggles - but this has been a long time coming.
Dean took time out of his new role to talk to us about his perspective as a man living with an eating disorder and how his life has changed for the better since he reached out for help.
Looking back, Dean sees how his eating disorder has always been a part of his life, since childhood. It was when he reached his forties, however, that it really began to take over his life.
He did not recognise that what he was experiencing was an eating disorder and felt he could not talk to anyone about his feelings and behaviours. A major part of this, Dean believes, was the belief that men don’t have eating disorders, coupled with the reluctance of many men to talk about their mental health concerns.
Dean said: “I think eating disorders are perceived as a weakness in men and I think men find it really difficult to talk about mental health issues. You feel like you don’t want to go and talk to people. I would never go and talk to friends in the pub about how I felt as I was really ashamed.
“I’m a fifty year old bloke and I wasn’t brought up to talk about my feelings. I was quite ashamed of having an eating disorder. I didn’t even recognise it as being an eating disorder at all at the time.
“I think women are quite happy to talk to each other about their weight and diets, if you’re a man talking about it in the pub you’ll just have the mickey taken out of you. It took me a long time to realise I had an eating disorder, I just felt that I wanted to eat all the time.”
Dean’s reaction reflects how eating disorders are perceived by wider society. A recent survey carried out by the eating disorder charity Beat on men’s experiences of eating disorders found that one in five men had never spoken about their struggles, while four in five felt that raising awareness would help men get treatment sooner.
Dean sought help from his GP and was referred to the Eating Disorder Service at Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
He added: “It was only when I started working with the Eating Disorder Service that it was highlighted to me that what I was doing was unhealthy and that I had a very unhealthy relationship with food. I now understand that and I’m certainly not ashamed of it now. I’m now happy to talk about it with whoever wants to talk about it. I wish it was discussed more amongst men.”
Talking about his feelings via group therapy was pivotal for Dean and literally helped to change his life.
He explained: “I really struggled at the start with group therapy, I felt I wasn’t the type of person to sit in front of people and talk all about it. Eventually I plucked up the courage to go and do it.
“I can’t explain enough how that made a massive difference and how it helped me. Just being able to talk to other people who have got their own stories and their own issues, they absolutely got it.
“It made it so much easier and it removed the guilt and it also removed the loneliness because I had people who really understood me. That’s really what turned my life around.”
Talking is the key for Dean, whether it is about eating disorders or other mental health issues.
Reflecting on how he finally spoke to his friends about his eating disorder, Dean explains: “What's really interesting is that when I talk to friends about it now, it’s quite surprising how they say ‘actually I understand that’.
“It might not be food with them, it could be something completely different, but all of us are sitting there, all trying to deal with what are essentially mental health problems. All of us are sitting there thinking nobody else understands what we’re going through.”
Now through his work as a peer support worker, Dean is on hand to ensure nobody living with an eating disorder feels alone, helping them on the road to recovery.