(Guardian, 21 Jul 2020)
On 11 April 2015, Ella Parry stood beside her small pink car, outside her council flat in Shrewsbury, watching the road. She was waiting for her mother to drop off her 17-year-old sister, Becky. The sisters were planning to go shopping together in Chester.
“Ella got into her car as we arrived, so I just caught a glimpse of her,” recalled her mother, Fiona Parry. “The sun was shining and Ella was smiling.” Ella was 21, tall and slim, with choppy blond hair. That day, as always, she wore full makeup – pale foundation, red lips, black Amy Winehouse-style eyeliner. Parry waved as they drove off. She would never see Ella alive again.
Since her early teens, Ella had been troubled. “She began to be unhappy about who she was, and it escalated,” said Parry. There were constant rows at home, she was excluded from school a few times for disruptive behaviour, and on one occasion the police were called after she tried to set fire to a building. At 17, Ella left home, and referred herself to social services. She was given accommodation and referred for mental-health assessment. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, characterised by emotional instability.
She was also, however, potentially brilliant. After she left home she did A-levels and went on to university. She seemed to be finding her direction in life: she worked as a “young health champion” on a project for vulnerable 11- to 18-year-olds. An NHS manager who worked with her described her as “incredibly talented”. “Everyone gravitated towards Ella, with her punky hair that was sometimes pink and that she wore sometimes with flowers in it,” said Karen Higgins, who met Ella in 2013 while on secondment to lead a project with Shropshire Youth Services. “She really understood young people and she had so much time and compassion for them.”
But Ella was struggling. By 2014, she was in the grip of an obsessive eating disorder. She had moved past the stage of using laxatives and over-the-counter diet pills. Through that winter and into 2015, Ella made entries in her diary that revealed her distress: “If only I could take a knife and cut all of the disgusting folds of fat out of my body”; “I hate my boobs, legs, face, stomach, arms, feet … ”; “My belly sticks out. I hate everything.”
In February 2015, she wrote in her diary, “I wish I could rip my heart out so I don’t have to feel this pain any more.” Convinced that the only thing that would end her anguish would be losing more weight, she scoured the internet for solutions. She read voraciously, on forums frequented by others who were as ill and distressed as she was, and, though she did not know it, by drug dealers looking for customers. Eventually, she found what she was looking for, a product that promised to “burn” excess fat more effectively than any other: the chemical substance 2,4-Dinitrophenol, known as DNP. She placed an order online just as easily as she might have ordered a book or a dress.
(read the full article at the Guardian)
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