OBMH provides NHS community services for patients with eating disorders across Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and provides NHS specialist inpatient care for patients from all over the country at its two inpatient units, Cotswold House at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, and Cotswold House in Savernake Hospital, Marlborough, Wiltshire.

We wholeheartedly support the call by the Royal College of Psychiatrists to have ‘pro-ana’ and ‘pro-mia’ websites, which characterise anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa as lifestyle choices, included within the definition of harmful web content by the Child Internet Safety Council.

These websites not only include tips on how to ‘resist’ eating and promote extreme weight loss, they also proffer advice on how to deceive the nurses, doctors and therapists who are working with the most severely ill patients, encouraging them to falsifying their weight or use methods to avoid eating or keeping down the food they so desperately need. Many of our patients have a real struggle to accept the need for treatment, as their ‘anorexic voice’ is so strong, and these websites are therefore targeting very unwell and vulnerable people when what they need is lots of support and positive encouragement to get well again.

Those with eating disorders who use these websites often do not realise that the pictures on them may have been altered, and much of the information presented as fact makes no scientific sense at all.

We encourage patients to use the internet to support each other, through for example social networking sites, and to use bona fide websites which promote recovery from anorexia nervosa, such as b-eat.