FAKED PHOTOS ARE WARPING YOUNG MINDS
AS a psychiatrist specialising in eating disorders, I’m afraid these soaring admissions come as no surprise to me. I have seen first-hand a huge leap in patients being referred to specialist eating- disorder services, with more and more becoming so unwell that a hospital admission is the only option to ensure their safety. Why? I think there are two reasons. The first is the rise of social media. Over the past few years, smart phones have meant that most of us – and particularly the tech-savvy young – now have constant access to a camera.
This has fuelled the development of an increasingly visually- dominated society where things like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram encourage us to share images of ourselves online.
Youngsters in particular are increasingly engaging with one another through photographs rather than words. It’s made many of them painfully self-conscious about their own bodies.
And this obsession with selfies has developed a dangerous twist. We all know that magazines and adverts airbrush images in order to sell products. But increasingly the images posted online by individuals have been altered in the same way, using simple apps you can download on your phone.
This means youngsters are being bombarded with images of models that appear to be taken spontaneously but in reality have been carefully manipulated to make them look slimmer.
Airbrushing, adding a filter to change the skin tone, enhancing the contrast and so on all create impossibly perfect bodies.
Many of my young patients have admitted becoming obsessed by images they see online, particularly of women with ‘ thigh gaps’ – a space between the top of the thighs thought to be a sign of exquisite slimness.
They entirely fail to realise that only a tiny fraction of the population naturally have these thigh gaps, and that the images have been digitally manipulated.
Desperate to emulate them, they embark on extreme diets. And among those who are susceptible – often due to underlying psychological and emotional difficulties – these diets can develop into an eating disorder.
The second reason for the rise in admissions is rather different – but just as worrying. When I began training it was not unusual for NHS patients to wait several years to receive so-called ‘talking therapies’ for problems such as mild depression. It was a national disgrace.
The response to this was the IAPT scheme – or Improving Access to Psychological Therapies – with staff recruited and trained across the country to provide cognitive behavioural therapy, which has proven success with depression and anxiety.
More than a million people had used the service by the end of its first three years of operation in March 2012. It hadn’t just eased distress, it had saved money for taxpayers, with 45,000 people coming off incapacity benefits after overcoming their problems.
But the scheme doesn’t cater for complex cases such as eating disorders, which require more specialist therapy. These have lost out – with waiting lists rising, not falling.
In the eating disorder service where I work, there is a two-year wait for psychotherapy. My colleagues and I are distraught.
A third of people with an eating disorder will die from it – an horrendous statistic. Yet people are having to wait years in order to get the treatment they need.
This is not to denigrate IAPT services – they do a great job. But their success has made the Government feel it has solved the problem of access to psychological therapies, when in fact there are still shamefully long waiting lists for those who need help most.
When patients with eating disorders have to wait so long for treatment, it’s inevitable many will deteriorate so badly that the only safe place for them is in hospital.
It’s tragic, needless – and, quite frankly, a scandal.