Recycled this from my HuffPost profile, but I thought it would be an important article to get the blog started...
I recently
spoke to a journalist who was interested in covering my row to London for Beat.
Her first question, before she even asked about what I was doing or why, was
‘Do you have any images of yourself at a low weight?’ As soon as I calmly
explained Beat’s guidelines on the topic, which advise ambassadors not to
provide these sorts of images, she launched into a heated speech about how she
‘simply couldn’t understand why that was necessary’ because if I was ‘claiming
to have been anorexic’ I would ‘need to prove it’! I thought to myself that
that is precisely the problem with the current state of the media: too many
people assume they understand eating disorders by sight alone, rather than stepping
outside of their comfort zone to consider the reality that they run much deeper
than skin level.
Given the
recent controversy on Twitter surrounding the portrayal of eating disorders on
popular TV programmes, it is important to recognise that their basis lies in
the psychological symptoms, NOT the physical alone! Displaying images of
sufferers in their skin-and-bone state puts too much focus on weight loss,
which is in fact just one of many symptoms of eating disorders – and actually
only applies to anorexia which accounts for just 10% of cases under the
umbrella term ‘eating disorders’. As a result this feeds the common
misconception that in order to have an eating disorder one must be drastically
underweight. In fact, many people who are diagnosed as having an eating
disorder never fall below a healthy weight!
In my own
fight for treatment I was turned away because I was not underweight enough,
even though I had already reached the stage of amenorrhoea. It seems so dismissive to believe that
anorexia in particular is categorised by emaciation: in my last blog I explained
how even after three years of maintaining a healthy weight – and therefore by
the media’s definition being recovered – I can still encounter the distorted
cognition associated with the illness. The weight is simply a by-product of the
thoughts, and so the thoughts are just as much present once the weight has been
gained, and take far longer to work through.
Another
common justification is that seeing such graphic images of starvation will make
an anorexic ‘think twice’ about ‘what they are doing to themselves.’ Anorexia
is NOT a lifestyle choice that can simply be opted out of! They are not doing
anything to themselves, they are being dictated to by the malicious voice of a
genuine illness. Susan Ringwood, CEO of Beat, said: ‘Eating disorders are more
hard wired than was first known to be the case… people with anorexia can know
they are at risk of dying and can find that less terrifying than gaining a few
pounds in weight.’ The ‘shock factor’ which is experienced by the typical
reader, and is exploited by the media, does not affect someone with an eating
disorder. Susan continued: ‘These images do not shock them, they excite,
encourage and motivate them to get as thin if not thinner than the person
depicted’.
‘Triggering’
can sound like such a trivial word, but the truth is that presenting emaciation
as a validation of anorexia not only promotes the denial of being ill because a
sufferer will never feel like they look like the person in the picture – and so
they can’t have the same illness – but also brings out the innately competitive
side of the illness and drives the need to restrict food further because they
take the image as evidence that they can (and in their mind should) be thinner!
It is
understandably difficult to comprehend the danger of these graphic images when
to most people they serve as a catalyst for disgust, but I would urge anyone
viewing such an image to consider it from the point of view of a person who is
caught in the deadly grasp of an eating disorder. To these people, opening that
magazine in which they sought a momentary escape from their own reality only to
be faced with a representation of the idol who they feel they can never
replicate merely reinforces the feeling of inadequacy, self-hatred and depression.
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