I've done a bit of a 180 on my stance regarding this particular topic. It's a difficult one to take a rigid view on. And not to paint myself as some kind of eating disorder authority but I've seen enough of them, in their various guises, to have a pretty good idea on the causes and more importantly perhaps, the psychology that tips one from strict diet to ED territory.
Seeing what I've seen both in me and close others, I have to now surmise that magazines and advertisements portraying size zero's are not the cause here.
Certainly they may have some part to play in perpetuating the issue, but do they overnight turn a psychologically sound person from normal to tissue-eating, cocaine-addicted anorexic who thinks diet coke is a good source of nutrition (as those scaremongering 'journalists' at the Daily Mail would have us believe is what constitutes anorexia)? Absolutely not. If these distorted, photoshopped images are making a marked and dangerous impact on someone's psyche and diet then I would argue this person is more than likely beyond rational thinking when it comes to food, their weight and body shape and indeed, have sometime beforehand already passed into the land of fucked up eating habits and super-strict calorie controlling.
Even the Guardian this week rehashed the old 'magazines are the devil and solely responsible for anorexia deaths' misconception (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/01/size-zero-campaigners-london-college-fashion), a publication I can usually rely on to offer a more balanced argument. Thankfully, the voice of reason here came in the form of the 200+ reader comments in response to the article with the best arguments perfectly summed up in these thought-provoking words -
'Anorexia is a symptom of mental illness, not an aspirational attempt to look like a fashion model... What is causing women of all ages, and some men too, to starve themselves sometimes to death? It sure as shit isn't Vogue.'
And then...
'I think part of the problem is that the term Anorexia, like so many psychiatric disorders, is overused in popular discourse. It's a bit like how someone who is feeling down is described as 'depressed' (which they're probably not, at least not in the clinical sense) or how someone who feels the need to check at least twice that they've locked the door is referred to as 'OCD' though chances are they're not. So too a teenaged girl who's constantly on a diet because she wants to look like a fashion model probably isn't anorexic - she just wants to look like a fashion model.'
In short, there exists absolutely no evidence of a causal relationship between fashion and anorexia. Fact.
Do I spend hours pouring over pictures of fashion models in an attempt to justify and maintain my under-eating? No. Do their ill-looking frames and hollow faces adorn my bedroom walls? No.
Now ask me whether I consume hungrily the recipe sections of magazines; or obsessively read cookery books; or lap up the images of food posted on Pinterest, and the answer is an unequivocal yes.
You can keep your Glamour mag, and the Marie Claire that I used to subscribe to, with their unrealistic images, sometimes so photoshopped that the figures shown are literally anatomical impossibilities. I would purchase every food and cooking magazine currently gracing the shelves if it wasn't for the fact I knew what mania this represents. I still now have to curb the part of my brain which would happily go back to visiting 4 or 5 supermarkets a day, spending an hour at each one, just taking in all the choice, calorie checking the foods I would buy if only I could, and then leaving with very little or sometimes nothing at all.
There is so much more to this mental illness than 'the diet gone wrong' that the media idiots would have us believe. Sure, it more often than not is instigated by a diet and it was for me. BUT it becomes an illness, in my non-medical opinion of course, because a) this person has some pre-disposition towards mental illness, b) as my previous post explored with the starvation study, the brain has been starved for a sufficient amount of time causing rational thought and normal life to have been abandoned and replaced by obsessive control and thoughts around food, or c) as is applicable in my case, a combination of A and B. An eating disorder is bugger all to do with vanity, or an aspiration to be catwalk thin, or even actually wanting to be thin. The main stimulus in driving the anorexic or eating disordered person to continue restricting and purging is their total inability to relinquish the control they feel they need to possess over their food intake. It's of course an entirely false, paradoxical sense of control because the one thing you think you're in control of (ie. your strict diet) is, in fact, controlling you. But you really do feel that, if you can just stick to the safe foods you've allowed into your life, you will maintain the control you so desperately crave, while everything else in your life feels like it's spiralling out of control.
Of course this is ridiculous, the one thing causing all else to spiral out of control IS the thing you're maintaining such control over. And even though I have always been able to identify and articulate this fact, it made no difference. In short, while I was / am restricting, I feel like I'm winning. Winning at what, who bloody knows. But the alternative, losing control over my diet fills me with a sense of guilt, failure, anxiety and losing.
I've probably lost you by now. And I'm aware how complex and contradictory in nature this whole issue is. I struggle to understand it myself sometimes with all it's backwards logic and absurd intricacies.
It really is time however that we tried to better our understanding and appreciation of the complexities of mental illness per se. One in four of us will be affected by it in our lifetimes so its kind of in our interests to become a little more learned on the topic.
We're in 2013 and we've not moved all that far away from the days when sufferers of depression or eating issues or any mental illness were consigned to the local mental institute, dosed up on enough mind-quelling meds to fell an elephant, allowing everyone else to get on with their lives, safe in the knowledge that the 'loonies' were safely boxed away. Another article published recently highlighted this fact - a washed up popstar, keen to eek out his 5 minutes of fame, was presumably hoping we'd all rush out and sympathy-buy his shite music when he spoke of being 'hooked' on Prozac.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for celebrities talking about their mental health issues in the public domain, presuming it's done in such a way that furthers helpful conversation on the subject, in the way that Stephen Fry did this week when he talked about his suicide attempt last year and ongoing battle with bipolar. But would we talk about someone with asthma being 'hooked' on their inhaler? Or a diabetic being 'addicted' to insulin injections?
Prozac and the many other forms of anti-depressant, if prescribed in correct dosages, do nothing more than stabilise the clinically depressed person, in much the same way as insulin works to stabilise the diabetic's blood levels. It simply works to reattach the wires that have come a bit loose in the depressive's brain, there's no 'high' gained from taking them and life doesn't suddenly take on a rose-tinted, dream-like quality. All it does is restore the balance, putting you on more even grounding to better address the underlying problems.
The difficulty comes I guess in the fact that mental illness doesn't manifest itself in an obviously physical way (though to the trained eye, it's not so hard to spot in the dead eyes, lack of energy and concentration, proneness to irritability, and overwhelming lowness and anxiety, to name but a few of the symptoms a depressed person battles against).
As the brilliant Stephen Fry highlighted in a recent interview (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the-victim-of-my-own-moods-stephen-fry-reveals-suicide-attempt-in-2012-adding-tv-producer-saved-his-life-8646378.html), depression and it's symptoms are often met with 'but what have you got to be sad about? Theres people far worse off than you'. And as he so eloquently sums it up, "That's the point, there is no 'why?' That's not the right question. There is no reason. If there was reason for it, you could reason someone out of it." We should no more be asking why someone suffers from depression or anorexia or any mental illness than why someone becomes diabetic or gets cancer. They just do.
Moreover, emphasising to the depressed person that they've nothing to be sad about and therefore implying they're wrong or selfish not to appreciate their lot, only further perpetuates the shame spiral they're most likely already stuck in. To bring this back to my situation, even at my lowest points I knew all too well that I'm blessed with a good life - I've a wonderful network of family and friends, have progressed quicker and done more things in my job than I could ever have hoped for, and don't really want for anything. But, as flippant and selfish as this may sound, when stuck in the maelstrom of depression, these truths mean nothing. I knew there was a good life out there to be had and I could see others living it, but being so consumed by darkness and overall despondency, I could in no way visualise myself living this good life again.
I don't have the answers, I only have my experience to speak of. I've not got it nailed by any stretch but it shouldn't be the case that a person needs to first hand experience mental illness to understand and empathise better.
And so here ends my thought / rant for the day.
Oh, just one more thing of relevance, I've signed up for the Royal Parks Half Marathon in October and I'll be running to raise money for Mind. So I'll soon be tapping you all up for some pennies to help this indispensable mental health charity continue their amazing work (this blog post hasn't just been an elaborate way of guilt-tripping you all into donating I promise!!). More to follow...
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