Heartstopper: ‘How Netflix show’s eating disorder story helps me’

Sharan, who is now 18, is not alone in their experience as a young LGBT woman. In 2021, Just like Us found, external that lesbian and bisexual teens were more than twice as likely to have had an eating disorder compared to straight girls, from a survey of nearly 3,000 teens across 375 UK schools.

The charity’s then-chief executive Dominic Arnall said homophobia was the main reason driving poor mental health and self-harming behaviours in the community.

The eating disorder charity Beat suggests that people can perceive eating orders as only affecting young middle class heterosexual white girls which can make some people with eating disorders feel invisible, like Sharan, who is of Asian heritage.

But it’s not just stereotyping that can make LGBT teens with eating disorders feel excluded.

Matthew Todd, the former editor of gay magazine Attitude, points to a lack of support in schools, where coming out can still be very difficult and come with “bullying, feeling isolated, feeling you can’t tell people”.

“When you have been told not to like yourself, you see yourself as your physical appearance, so we turn those things on ourselves,” he says.

Matthew says the rise of social media and “visual culture, [where] you cannot get away from images of bodies” may also help explain the higher rates of eating disorders within the LGBT community.

Social media wasn’t around 20 years ago when James, who is gay, first developed anorexia aged 14.