By Karen Percy
Kate Carnell, the current head of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former ACT chief minister, has revealed details of a teenage struggle with the eating disorder, anorexia nervosa.
While it can be hard to image Ms Carnell as anything other than a high achiever, she said the disease left her “feeling sick all the time” and having tension headaches.
“What I remember is… feeling really rotten about myself, about what I was doing to others in my life and having an absolute focus on food,” the 59-year-old told the ABC’s 7.30 program.
Before she developed the condition she had been a good student and an avid tennis player.
“I started to lose weight when I was 12 or 13, when I started to become interested in fashion and boys,” she said.
“What happened of course is that my behaviour was reinforced a lot.
“People said, ‘Wow, you look great, it’s fantastic’, and being somebody who was always an over-achiever… I thought OJ, I can do this even better.”
Her weight dipped to about 30 kilograms.
“I wasn’t [looking great] I was looking really skinny and we’ve still got stick-thin models that don’t look really well and we still seem to perceive that’s beauty,” she said.
“That just reinforces the issue that people with eating disorders have.
“It’s bad for our society, it’s not healthy and yet we still do it — it’s hard to understand why.”
Eating disorders cost country $67.9 billion in 2012
Ms Carnell today helped to launch a report commissioned by the eating disorder advocacy group The Butterfly Foundation.
The foundation revealed that in 2012 alone, eating disorders cost the country $67.9 billion in health costs, including lost productivity by sufferers and their carers, absenteeism and premature deaths.
It affected 913,000 Australians in 2012, with 1,828 of them dying.
Through her teens during the 1960s and 70s, Ms Carnell was in and out of hospitals in her home town of Brisbane.
She admitted to lying to her parents about what she was eating and how much exercise she was doing.
“Year 9 was doctors, hospitals, nausea, vomiting, not much school and a family that walked around on eggshells,” she said.
At 15, the situation was so dire that she was sent to an adolescent psychiatric unit at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney.
“For a 15-year-old away from home it was to say the least pretty scary,” she said.
“But at least I got treatment and many young people with eating disorders weren’t getting treatment back in those days.”
She still has the letters she sent to her parents at that time.
“Tuesday night — Dear Mum and Dad, It’s great news about the weight. Dr Johnson is happy but not nearly as happy as me,” she wrote.
“I’m not thinking about food all the time, I’m thinking about home.
“I’m so homesick and just want to get home to you.”
Her parents were only allowed to visit infrequently, flying between Brisbane and Sydney.
Ms Carnell talks of the “financially huge and psychologically huge” impact her condition had on them.
“Imagine a scenario when you’ve got a teenage daughter who’s always been a bit of an overachiever, pretty smart, those sorts of things — and all of a sudden they’re killing themselves in front of your eyes,” she said.
It was not until she was 19 years old that she finally was able to get her life back.
“I was lucky that I did get into university, and I did do a university degree and that wasn’t the case for a large number of others,” she said.
“These are dreadful conditions so I’m not even slightly surprised that the impact upon people and families, and on the economy more broadly, is huge.”
Report recommends centres for treating eating disorders
Now, four decades later and with a hugely successful multi-faceted career (she trained as a pharmacist at university before life in politics and business), Ms Carnell said she wanted to use her influence with business and government to start a conversation about mental health issues, and eating disorders in particular.
“Anorexia came at a significant cost to me, my family, the health system, to the community,” she said.
“Let’s make sure for the next generation — for my kids, my grandkids, that they end up in a better space.”
The Butterfly Foundation’s report, Investing In Need: Cost-effective interventions for eating disorders, recommended that governments spend $500 million over five years to establish centres dedicated to diagnosing and treating eating disorders.
The report showed that health costs for a young sufferer could be more than $260,000 a year, taking into account doctors, hospital visits, psychiatrists and other costs.
The condition can last for five years or more, so the cost to individuals, families and society can add up.
Ms Carnell has a hectic schedule to keep, dividing her time between her work commitments in Canberra and her family in Sydney where she loves to canoe or kayak around the waters of Sydney with her husband Ray Kiley.
But even after all these years, and so many successes behind her, Ms Carnell has to check herself on occasions.
“Food is still much more of a focus in my life than it should be, I still have to have discussions with myself about body image, because… I still naturally think I’m too fat,” she said.
“It is hard to understand why you can’t put a piece of food in your mouth, chew it up and swallow it. How hard can that be?
“Well, I tell you what, when you’ve got anorexia it’s like moving a mountain.”
Watch Kate Carnell’s story, along with an interview with Butterfly Foundation chair David Murray, on tonight’s 7.30 program.