"Nobody can imagine how awful it feels unless they feel it themselves. It's just like hell on earth."Like Chris Saville, Anne Turner only found out that body dysmorphic disorder was a recognised illness when she read about it in the press. At her worst stage, she used a facial steamer to repeatedly peel layers of skin from her face until it was raw. She was spending pounds 400-pounds 500 a month on cosmetics, beauty treatments and her hair "I'm so disgusted with how I look," she says. She has spent much of the last five years at home, obsessively washing and blow-drying her hair, bathing, and carrying out beauty treatments. Yet there is a big difference between casting surreptitious glances at other people's cellulite-free thighs in the changing room, and body dysmorphic disorder, which can be seriously disabling.Twenty-four-year-old Anne Turner (not her real name) dropped out of an interior design course because of her illness. Others may never get to see a psychiatrist, seeking help instead from plastic surgeons or skin specialists.People with the condition constantly check what they look like in the mirror and compare themselves to others - habits which many "normal" people may recognise in themselves.
American psychiatrist Katharine A Phillips has called it a "secret disorder", because many sufferers are so embarrassed that they keep their symptoms to themselves. Despite such bolstering, people with body dysmorphic disorder become obsessed with defects that are non-existent, or are so small as to be virtually invisible. They exaggerate their minor flaws, especially the nose, eyes, facial spots and wrinkles Glen Saville believed he looked like a monkey. He used to dash his head against a wall, to knock what he saw as his "prominent eyebrows" down to normal size.It is difficult to say how common body dysmorphic disorder is, or why people develop it. She believes, rightly or wrongly, that her lack of understanding of Glen's condition contributed to his suicide. The night before his death, they quarrelled, and Glen threatened to kill himself "You don't understand me, do you, Mum?" he asked.
"No, I don't," she said, "you're a lovely looking boy." "Well, there is no hope, then," Glen ominously replied.What Chris did not know at the time was that reassuring a sufferer is the worst thing a carer can do. "Thoughts of being ugly invade every waking moment, gone only when asleep. Life is pure hell." Not long after Glen's death, his mother, Chris Saville, came across a newspaper article about an illness called body dysmorphic disorder The description seemed to fit her son's condition exactly. One October day when Glen was 29, his mother came home to find that he had hanged himself. Yet from his school days, he was tormented by a belief that he looked ugly. So convinced was he that people were laughing at him and that they hated him because of his looks, that he barely left the house he shared with his mother.
The worst part was the coffins full of bones and nasty smelling water.. GLEN SAVILLE was a good-looking young man with an attractive smile. We went all over the place and the money wasn't bad either.DAVID GILHOOLY, dentist: I mostly did building work during the holidays. I remember I worked for one building firm extending a local church It involved digging up part of the graveyard. The money came in handy but the main reasons I did it was I could watch the the latest films for free.DON FOSTER, Liberal Democrat Education Spokesman: I've done a stack of jobs from operating a pea cleaning machine to filling plastic teddy bears with foul smelling bubble bath. It was my dream to become a painter but I soon realised that I wouldn't earn enough to make a living so I carried on with a scientific career.JOHN MARRAY, solicitor: The worst student job I had was stacking shelves for my local Sainsbury's. An assistant manager with milk bottle glasses and a humungous boil on the back of his neck told me off for being unhygienic because I hadn't shaved for a day.JANE BRAND, theatrical agent: During term time I worked one night selling cinema tickets in Oxford.
