A Birmingham academic has described “sculpted, sucked-in and slimmed-down female bodies” across social media sites as “deeply problematic” in the wake of a chilling rise of teenagers being admitted to A&E with eating disorders.
New figures revealed the number of young people admitted to hospital with eating disorders has almost doubled in the last three years.
In the last 12 months alone numbers hit 1,800 – up from 1,000 in 2011. The NHS revealed that the vast majority were female with the average age of 15.
Last year, it emerged 300 patients, including children as young as five years old, had been admitted to hospitals in Birmingham with eating disorders in the 2012-13 financial year.
Anna Lavis, research fellow for primary care clinical sciences at the University of Birmingham, said: “Images of sculpted, sucked-in and slimmed-down female bodies across Instagram and Facebook, for example, as well as in the news media, are deeply problematic.
“They give women of all ages the message that to be of value in contemporary British society they should look a certain way. And, habitually, that way is thin. This society-wide obsession with the thinness and supposed perfection of female bodies is dangerous. It has the potential to define the boundaries of girls’ ambitions, limiting their sense of self to bodies alone.”
But she said she was concerned it was too much of a “quick jump” to put any rise purely down to this phenomenon.
Dr Lavis said her research led her to believe that comments made by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, that much of the increase was down to social pressure made worse by online images, was “troubling.” She said: “It risks undermining the lived realities of people with eating disorders by conflating two issues that are not so neatly linked.
“However, to cite such imagery as a root cause of eating disorders is too simple . It both undermines and genders the condition, making it simply about female bodies, and ignoring men who may be living with these illnesses.
“Recent qualitative studies have suggested that, to understand eating disorders, their causes and possible relationships with social media, it is imperative to listen to the stories of individuals themselves.”
Dr Lavis said while researching websites which promoted anorexia, she interviewed a young woman called Miriam, who told her: “There are lots of people who think it’s just a vanity thing like, you know, anorexia is just the thinness and wanting to look thin, but it’s not a vanity thing, it’s not at all. People go: ‘Oh, everyone’s trying to copy this size-zero trend.’ And it’s not, it’s not! You don’t look at a picture, and say: ‘Oh, I must look like that girl, therefore I must lose weight, therefore I’m an anorexic!’ It’s absolutely nothing to do with that.”
Dr Lavis said that, in Miriam’s case, she was not obsessed with being thin, rather being something which helped her cope with pressures in her life at that time.
In other cases, the same conclusions could be reached, said Dr Lavis.
She said: “Narratives such as Miriam’s highlight the need to acknowledge that those affected may recognise the suffering eating disorders cause while also viewing them as integral to how they cope with being in the world.
“This means we should reconsider the relationship between body image – and therefore social media imagery of bodies – and eating disorders. Individuals’ stories suggest that, although not necessarily a primary goal, thinness may become important to people when already in the grip of an eating disorder.
“If thinness is not necessarily a goal of people with eating disorders, then looking at online images of thin people is not an underlying cause of those conditions. Rather, as research has suggested, this may be a way of motivating oneself to continue to self-starve when already in the grip of the illness.”
