Michael Smart
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Media messages perpetuate, but don't initiate, eating disorders, say BYU professors
photo available at http://www.byu.edu/news/features/eatingdisorder/photos.html
Mary turned to bulimia and anorexia while feeling tremendous pressure to be thin as a high school cheerleader. She looked to beauty and fashion magazines not for entertainment, but for "helpful hints" on binging and purging.
"If a magazine said, 'Bulimia ruined my life, a true story,' I would read it just to find ideas," said Mary, whose name has been changed. "I wanted to get people's secrets, and I wanted to figure out what Karen Carpenter did because I needed to do the same thing."
Mary was interviewed as part of an interdisciplinary study at Brigham Young University on how women with eating disorders use the media.
From survey results and in-depth interviews, BYU professors concluded that pointing a finger at the media for causing eating disorders is overly simplistic.
"There is a fine line of responsibility on the part of the media," said Steven Thomsen, associate professor of communications. "The media do not act as an initiating, but rather as a perpetuating force to those who suffer from an eating disorder.
"To these young women who are at risk, some of these beauty and fashion magazines can be as dangerous as giving a beer to an alcoholic," he added. "The very factors that have made them vulnerable to an eating disorder also heighten their vulnerability to images of thinness and false promises of happiness."
Thomsen, who studies the media, teamed with Kelly McCoy, assistant professor of family science at BYU, and Marleen Williams, associate clinical professor of counseling psychology at BYU, on the project.
Thomsen presented the team's findings recently at the Fourth London International Conference on Eating Disorders. More than 700 doctors, therapists and researchers from 34 countries discussed treatment therapies and research findings.
Unlike previous eating disorder studies, the BYU research examines the motivations behind women's use of beauty and fashion magazines, not just the frequency with which the magazines are read. The findings show that anorexics use the media in a distorted manner.
"Understand that it's not necessarily the media's fault, but that young women may choose to use the media to support and reinforce their eating disorder," Thomsen said.
Several factors emerged from the study that can help parents, therapists and researchers determine whether a young woman is at risk for developing an eating disorder. Why a woman reads particular magazines is far more important than how often she reads them, Thomsen said.
"Reading motivations most associated with anorexic risk include a desire to learn popular diets, a desire to become skinny like magazine models and a belief that reading the magazines will lead to greater popularity, happiness and acceptance by family and friends. When these motivations are combined with an excessive anxiety about body appearance, the risk becomes even greater," Thomsen explained.
"Reading motivations that should cause less concern include reading for entertainment purposes or out of boredom and reading to learn new trends or how to improve relations with the opposite sex," he said.
Knowing that anorexics have a mortality rate of nearly 20 percent -- the highest of any mental illness -- many magazines and television programs have addressed the disorder. But even a well intended message can backfire.
"In many cases, messages intended to scare women away from anorexia actually pushed them closer to it," Thomsen said, referring to Mary's interview and others. "They twisted and distorted articles to serve their purpose."
For these women, television programs' and magazines' messages both serve as support for the mental illness, but do so in different ways, Thomsen explained. "Magazine articles and advertisements become instruction manuals on what to look like, how to look that way, and why one should look like that," he said.
Television shows, however, function as an escape from what the patients perceive as a threatening and disappointing world, he said. These shows, everything from prime-time dramas to daytime soap operas, become an alternate way of building and living in a world the patients desire, but cannot obtain.
The research, funded by the BYU Family Studies Center and the Wendell J. Ashton Fund, was divided into two phases. The team first worked with Robert L. Gustafson, associate professor of advertising at Ball State University, to conduct surveys of 540 college-age women. Then the professors conducted in-depth interviews with 28 outpatients at an eating disorder treatment facility.
Looking at the issue from a family and social angle, family science professor McCoy said it's difficult to pinpoint the cause for eating disorders.
"There is not one single characteristic that predicts the onset for an anorexic," he said. "All seem to come to their eating disorder from different experiences."
"Factors that occur in a young woman's immediate surroundings -- her family, friends and coaches -- are what seem to establish the initial flames of anorexia," McCoy explained. "But the media contribute much to it becoming a full-blown fire."
From a therapy perspective, Williams, the professor of counseling psychology, said the findings of the study also suggest women at risk for an eating disorder are growing up before they are physically and emotionally prepared.
"Many of the women we studied had to take on adult concerns at too early of an age, before they had the maturity to manage them," she said. "We need to let children grow up naturally and not impose adult concerns on them too early."
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