meanwhile over in the real world...

I seem to be on something of a roll with blog posts, even if the two I have in mind for the next couple of days are more re-blogs of other people's words. ICED was exciting from the outside and looks to have been even more from the inside and I'm sure it will continue to spark ideas and blogs in many for some time to come.

However (you just knew there'd be a but) one of the delights of the PC, as opposed to the little screen on my phone from where I connect to the world when I don't have a computer, is that you can fail to engage properly with six different screens at once (in other circles it's called multi-tasking). So while I was whiling away my time reading posts from and about the great and the good (Cynthia Bulik pre-tweeted her own talk, how cool is that?) I was also keeping up with fellow parents on this side of the Atlantic who are trying to get much needed help out of, or even just get some sense out of their local ED services.

I don't think that anyone at ICED stated that there even WAS a perfect system for ED care, let alone that anyone anywhere got it. In fact I know from twitter that one slide specifically mentioned how few people access treatment, how "we are reaching only the minority of individuals with ED".  Whether that is because people don't present for treatment or because when they do there isn't any to hand is a moot point. It IS probably a bit of both, but if the clued up, caring, informed parents Around The Dinner Table can't make services work for them, and more importantly, for their loved ones, it really shows how dire the situation is.

On Thursday we'll have a general election. It may well take a few more weeks to get a new government but from Friday moring onwards I'll be lobbying whoever I can think of to GENUINELY IMPROVE mental health care in general and eating disorders care in particular. It's a long way from Boston US to Boston (or any other town) UK. I expect  it's also a long way from ICED to real on the ground treatment in Massachusetts and if friends want signatures etc to help there I'll oblige, but my number one priority will be to lobby locally and nationally. At present the situation can only be described as dire.