
Your real-life stories
Medical research gives hope to people who desperately need better solutions for their health challenges. Read the stories below, to find out how.
Helen Shaddock is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Newcastle. Her work is centred around her experience of living with eating distress, obsessive compulsive disorder and autism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Helen’s symptoms of eating distress were compounded by social isolation, a new national focus on exercise, food shortages, and changes to her treatment – which largely moved to remote healthcare. In this period, Helen found a new creative outlet - a series called ‘The Lockdown Diaries’.
Helen also took part in the Foundation-funded RHED-C Project, led by researcher Dr Dawn Branley-Bell, which addresses the challenges of remote healthcare for people with an eating disorder, as both a workshop leader and study participant.
When I was young, I was given advice that really put me at a disadvantage.
“I’ve been living with eating distress since I was 12, and since then I’ve had various interventions from community health teams and specialist eating disorder services.
When I was young, I was given advice that really put me at a disadvantage. The emphasis was on calorie counting and making sure you had met your calorific intake. That set me back because now I can’t stop; it became drilled into me.
Before the pandemic, I was in a period where I was not seeing professionals - I was managing it on my own. But I knew from day one how much [the pandemic and lockdowns] would affect me.”
“The pandemic affected my exercising - I found that I was compulsively exercising a lot more.
It was all the Joe Wicks content and some of the media was very much about losing weight, couch to 5k campaigns, and how unhealthy people were getting.
As someone who struggles with eating distress, I felt like I needed to be doing more. I needed to do more exercise, be healthier.”
Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses affecting people of all ages, genders, ethnicities and backgrounds.
Like other mental health conditions, research into eating disorders has been severely underfunded. However, the scale of eating disorder diagnoses is rising, and we need to know more about what causes eating disorders, in order to develop more effective treatment services.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a vast impact on eating disorder symptoms, influencing factors including food restriction, binge eating and exercise. With health services needing to rapidly transfer online, this brought new challenges for those using remote services.
Helen refers to her condition as an ‘eating distress’ rather than an ‘eating disorder’.
“The eating distress warps your brain and you find ways of getting around certain rules.
The lack of social contact we were able to have was another thing that was hugely detrimental. I live on my own - and I did throughout the pandemic - and that was really isolating. When you’re having these thoughts, they perpetuate in your own head and you’ve got no escapism from them because you’re on your own all day.”
“I vividly remember the announcement on the radio when Boris [Johnson] said what would be involved. I immediately thought this is going to cause havoc in my life.
I needed to do something that would occupy me in a positive way and would be something to connect me with other people.
Every day, I would draw an A5 black-and-white drawing with activities I’d done during the day, little pictures, songs of the day, podcasts and any culture that I’d really been accessing.
At the end of the day, I would take a photo, put it on my blog and share it on social media. It got quite a large following online.”
“At the beginning, I didn’t really write too much about my eating distress, but as the pandemic went on, I wanted people to understand more about the impact it was having on my eating distress and OCD. So, I began to share more about my experiences and people really responded well to that because it gave them an understanding of the everyday things I was dealing with.
When lockdown ended, I kind of had this big reflection. I was like, do I stop now? And so many people said they didn’t want me to stop – they said they were learning so much! And also for myself – the lockdown diaries became so ingrained in me. I wouldn’t term it like art therapy, but it is a way of me processing things.
So, I carried on doing the diaries and now they’re a ‘daily diary.’”
“The hope is, if people can be caught at an early stage of their distress with eating, that they’ve got a much better chance of recovery. The research shows that within the first five years, if you get the right help, you’re much more likely to be able to live a life free of an eating disorder, or a much better quality of life.
One of the things that I think is really important about funding into eating disorders is that there is so much more that is being discovered. There’s a lot more to be learnt about how to tailor treatments to specific needs.”
During the pandemic, Helen was commissioned by New Writing North to create a blank template for people to fill in their own diaries, which gained popularity. She also developed artED, a website showcasing Helen’s exploration of eating distress through artistic practice, which launched at the end of September 2024.
You can find out more about Helen's work on her website.
Learn more about the Foundation-funded RHED-C project.
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