10 things you're probably dying to know about the eating disorder ward

In 2020, Emer spent two months in a psychiatric hospital which, she explains, is like "a dysfunctional Gaeltacht".

*This piece contains references serious mental health conditions including eating disorders and suicidal ideation*

In January 2020, I was admitted to an eating disorder ward in a Dublin psychiatric hospital. I had sought help the previous year after more than two decades of misery around food and weight – starving and bingeing and purging and gaining and losing and using eating disorders to cope with The Horrors.

When the psychiatrist mentioned “inpatient” I got a land. Surely I wasn’t sick enough to actually be admitted to hospital? Sleep in a hospital bed? I didn’t have any nice pyjamas. Who would mind the bloody cat?

Somehow, I had it in my head that I was going into hospital for a week or so. Two months later I emerged, a shell of my former self but also in the early stages of a journey to recovery which now, four years later, feels like there might be an end just over that mountain and around some winding roads.

I know that I, a nosey hole, would be full of questions about what it’s like to spend eight weeks in the Mad House (you’re allowed call it that once you’ve done a certain number of hours of mindful colouring, nighttime checks and traumatic group therapy), so here are a few things I learned on the inside (plus a bonus thing from Sarah, one of my loyal visitors) …