With that much of a lag, people coming to it later and presumably with a bit more of an acute position and there being this lack of resources, what do you think needs to change to improve access to early intervention treatment?

Well, to its credit, the Victorian government, after the explosion of cases through COVID, did implement a Victorian eating disorders strategy that we were involved with.

And there's also an implementation plan.

And what that does is it specifies a step system of care for people to go through.

And we're certainly embedded across that step system.

So that's in place.

And the report calls for the investment in that.

And Paul, as a carer and someone who's working in this space now, what do you say are the early signs that families, friends and GPs often overlook that we should be more aware of?

Was there anything you discovered while writing this book that changed your own perspective?

I think just the scale.

So we all talk about family and domestic violence.

Most of us have probably experienced it in some extended family way.

I think knowing over 2 million women in Australia have experienced that, I think maybe 2.8, just the scale of it is just incredible.

And the fact that we almost have had a cultural experience acceptance at times and and that then feeds into gender equality and the fact that women being disempowered can lead to quite easily lead to this violence so i think just the scale the fact that although you know we we seem to be a progressive country maybe we we're not that progressive in in a lot of these areas and we need to be more progressive.

I often feel like my parents came out as ten-pound bombs in the 50s.

And exactly what you said a moment ago that people are just culturally adapted to it now and don't even realize when it's happening in front of them and choose to ignore it or ignore it because it's just become their norm with that so how do we create lasting change without burning ourselves out emotionally

So it's a difficult landscape at the moment, yeah?

No, it is.

And especially this is tax time.

So most charities will have an appeal at the moment.

So for people to donate before the tax time.

So what the book does is you don't necessarily need to donate.

There's a whole range of things you can do.

There's many things you could do.