Supporting young people with eating disorders

• Date: March 20, 2024
• Time: 10:30 – 15:30
• Cost: BSA Full Member – £155, BSA Affiliate Member – £230, Non-member – £310
• Audience: Boarding staff, medical staff, Head of Boarding, Deputy Head, mental health leads
• Platform: Zoom (online) – Day Seminar

Course outline:

Eating disorders are wide-ranging and complicated, and remain high on the list of risk areas in mental health care and provision, especially for young people. Eating disorders are a complex mental illness with a high mortality rate, not only down to the eating disorder and malnutrition, but also suicide. For staff working with young people, having the confidence to offer support, and open up conversations about eating disorders can be nerve-wracking.

Our expert speaker, Tina McGuff, will address the need to raise awareness and have a proactive approach to supporting mental health concerns before the need for clinical intervention is reached. Tina will share her own story and invites delegates to ask questions. She will then go through the do’s and don’ts of supporting people with eating disorders, considering use of language, active listening, cultural differences and how eating disorders will be experienced differently by different people.

Training topics will include:

• A lived experience of eating disorder
• Do’s and don’ts of supporting people with eating disorders
• Language
• Cultural differences
• How experiences will vary

Learning outcomes:

• Improved confidence in supporting people with an eating disorder
• Improved confidence in approaching people you may think are displaying signs of needing early intervention
• Signs and symptoms
• Do’s and don’ts when it comes to supporting people with eating disorders
• Use of language
• Importance of active listening
• Cultural differences for international students
• Seeking appropriate clinical intervention

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Speaker:

Tina McGuff

Tina McGuff is an author, international speaker and advocate for mental health. Having shared her struggles in her critically acclaimed memoir, Seconds to Snap, Tina has established herself as a leading voice on eating disorders, mental health wellness and is a regular contributor across national media. Tina has appeared on Lorraine, Channel 5, ITV, STV, BBC as well as Jeremy Vine, Radio 1 and other national and international media outlets.

Tina grew up in Dundee and spoke of her life being perfect – or so she thought. “I can tell you exactly the day it all went wrong – the day my mum attacked my dad with a kitchen knife. In those few, short seconds, a black hole opened up in my life and I fell right in.” Tina’s world turned upside down. Tina turned to the one thing she thought she could control – food and from this moment, began the biggest fight of her life.

Tina openly shares her life-or-death struggle with anorexia and the darkest moments she experienced in her life whilst in and out of psychiatric wards. Tina enlightens her audience to inner struggles and silence that individuals face with any mental health disorder.

Tina now works to raise awareness and education through workshops, talks and training across the world as far as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, invited by the Prime Minister’s Office in the UK and across schools in the USA. Tina shares her insight to help leaders and managers support colleagues and their families via her Three T’s model – supporting difficult conversations that could save and change people’s lives as well as building stronger relationships within the workplace.