Former ITN anchor admits he struggled to cope watching his daughter Maddy 'wasting away' in a frank interview for the mental health campaign Heads Together
TV news reader Mark Austin has been filmed confronting his daughter over her struggle with anorexia, telling her: "You were completely determined to kill yourself."
The former ITN News at Ten anchor tells of his despair at watching Maddy "wasting away" in a frank interview for the Royal-backed mental health campaign Heads Together.
He has previously told how he struggled to cope with the illness and admitted he once told her to "get on with starving yourself to death".
Talented runner Maddy, now 22, shed four stone after suddenly developing the condition when she was 17, dropping from 9st 7lb to just 5st 7lb.
In the new video Mark tells her: "I could never understand what had triggered you from being a normal, healthy 17-year-old to lose so much weight so quickly.
"I couldn’t understand what was going through your mind."
Maddy replies: "I think I always had this underlying depression, this underlying low, where I always felt like I wasn’t good enough.
"The only way that I could show the world I wasn’t OK was by controlling what I was eating, by losing weight, by having this one thing I could control."
Mark, 58, says he found it impossible to know how to help his daughter, saying: "I couldn’t even come to terms with how to stop it or how to help you.
"It was like you were completely determined to kill yourself.
"I got it badly wrong, we got it badly wrong. But then I don’t know how people would know how to deal with that, watching your daughter wasting away."
Mark, who quit ITV last year after 30 years with the channel, first revealed his family's heartache in a BBC radio interview in November as he campaigned for more help for sufferers.
Last month he wrote movingly in the Sun about how he and his A&E doctor wife Catherine started to "crack" under the strain of Maddy's illness.
He admitted he at fist thought Maddy she was being "crass, insensitive, selfish and pathetic" by refusing to eat.
He wrote: "As a father you have to make a decision and I made the wrong one. I decided to go on the attack.
"I told her she was being ridiculous. I told her to get a grip and grow up, to 'just bloody well eat, for Christ’s sake'.
"I even remember saying, 'If you really want to starve yourself to death, just get on with it'. And at least once, exasperated and at a loss, I think I actually meant it.
"What I failed utterly to grasp was that she was seriously mentally ill and could not see a future for herself."
Maddy, now at university, began to recover after treatment at an NHS clinic at Farnham Hospital in Surrey, with monitored meal times and intensive counselling.
The video of the Austins was one of ten films specially commissioned by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry for their Heads Together campaign.
Other feature rapper Professor Green, former England cricketer Freddie Flintoff and comedian Ruby Wax talking about their experiences with mental illness.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4368
