Content note: this article discusses eating disorders, psychiatric hospitalisation, restrictive practice, self-harm and suicidal ideation.

There's a particular kind of hope that dies when a hospital system stops believing you're getting better.

For Hannah Whitfield, creative activist, writer, performer and founder of Legally Detained, that hope was rebuilt not by a single breakthrough, but by years of surviving a system that, by her own account, often made things worse before it made them better.

Hannah's platform, Legally Detained, takes its name directly from her own history. It's a phrase most people flinch at. That's the point. As Hannah puts it, a name that makes people stop and ask "why is it called that?" is exactly the kind of friction that opens the door to a harder conversation, one about what actually happens inside psychiatric inpatient units, and what needs to change.

A System Built Around the Wrong Number

Hannah's first hospital admission came at 16, after years of eating difficulties and suicidal ideation that clinicians in her local CAMHS team initially dismissed. She was placed on a general mental health ward rather than a specialist eating disorder unit, a decision that had serious consequences. Within weeks, her physical health deteriorated so severely that she had to be rushed to a general hospital.

What followed was over four years moving between CAMHS units, adult psychiatric services, and eventually secure care, a pattern Hannah describes as becoming "a revolving door patient." One of the recurring obstacles she points to is BMI criteria used to determine access to eating disorder treatment. In her local area, she says, the threshold was set so low it fell below NHS clinical guidelines for anorexia, meaning she spent years being told, implicitly and explicitly, that she wasn't "sick enough" to receive proper help.

That gap between how unwell someone actually is and what a number on a chart says is a theme Hannah returns to throughout her advocacy work: metrics that were never designed to measure suffering end up deciding who gets support.

When Safety Becomes Something Else

Hannah is careful to distinguish between restrictive practices that are genuinely necessary for patient safety, and those that cross into something closer to punishment. She's open about the fact that during periods of serious illness, she needed things taken away from her for her own protection, and that this, done with care, has its place.

But she also describes moments where restriction seemed to serve no safety purpose at all. One example stayed with her: during a stay in secure services, staff took her teddy bear, a source of comfort that had been with her throughout her life , undressed him, and placed him behind the glass of a seclusion room door, visible but unreachable. Not because of any safety policy. Because they knew how much it would upset her.

It's this kind of detail that Hannah returns to when she talks about the line between necessary care and institutional abuse. Least restrictive practice, she argues, isn't just a clinical principle; it's a basic requirement of treating someone with dignity. And she's clear that the pressures underfunded, understaffed services are under don't excuse the erosion of a patient's human rights; if anything, that's exactly the systemic problem that needs addressing.

Rock Bottom, and the Decision to Live Differently

After nearly five years of hospital admissions, Hannah reached a breaking point following a particularly harmful experience with a social worker who, she says, discharged her in the middle of the night with nowhere safe to go. In that moment, she made a decision: rather than following through on the plan she'd had before being stopped, she called her mother.

That decision marked a turning point, but not an instant one. Recovery, for Hannah, wasn't a single moment of clarity so much as a slow accumulation of purpose. A part-time job supporting a child with additional needs gave her a reason to get up in the morning that was "bigger than herself." Youth voice work gave her, for the first time, the experience of being properly listened to. And a later ADHD diagnosis and subsequent treatment gave her the ability to reflect on her own patterns and history with a clarity she'd never had access to before.

Piece by piece, she began to understand what her eating disorder had actually been doing for her, tied, she explains, to childhood trauma, complex PTSD, and a need for safety that restriction had come to represent. Understanding why mattered more than being told to simply stop.

Recovery Isn't a Utopia

One of the most striking parts of Hannah's reflection is her honesty about what recovery actually feels like, because it isn't the blissful, symptom-free future she once imagined. Setbacks still happen. Bad days still happen. What's changed is her relationship to them: she no longer treats a wobble as evidence that she's failed, or as a reason to spiral. She's learned, in her words, to ride the wave.

That distinction matters enormously for anyone currently in treatment who's been sold recovery as a finish line rather than an ongoing practice. Building a life, with purpose, belonging, and self-trust, doesn't eliminate hard moments. It just means those moments stop having the power to undo everything.

Where Legally Detained Comes In

Today, Hannah's work through Legally Detained turns that lived experience into something structural: creative activism, public speaking, training and consultancy work with services and institutions, and a platform that centres young people who've been failed by systems that were never built with them in mind. It's built on a simple but radical premise, that the people who survived these systems are the ones best placed to help redesign them.

Her message isn't just about individual recovery. It's a call for systemic change: better reintegration support after discharge, less reliance on arbitrary numerical thresholds, more investment in genuinely least-restrictive care, and, perhaps most fundamentally, a recognition that purpose and belonging are not "extras" in mental health treatment, but central to it.

Hannah's full story, including the details behind her recovery, her diagnosis journey, and how she turned survival into a career built on advocacy,  is one of the most honest conversations we've had on the podcast. If any part of this resonated with you, or if you're supporting someone going through something similar, we'd really encourage you to listen to the full episode.

If you're currently struggling with an eating disorder or experiencing suicidal thoughts, please reach out for support. In the UK, you can contact Beat (the UK's eating disorder charity) on 0808 801 0677, or the Samaritans on 116 123 (free, 24/7). If you're outside the UK, please seek support from a local crisis or mental health service.