Social media is the great enabler of eating disorders – it’s time we fought back
It is clear now that Meta and TikTok won’t take responsibility for our mental wellbeing. Young women will need to do it themselves – in the only way the social media giants will understand.
I spent over half of my life as a bulimic – from the age of 12 to 26 (I’m 27 now). That’s 14 years’ time served in self-imprisonment, which is what eating disorders become when they develop, completely resistant to intervention, reason or reassurance.
Initially, the disease is a useful distracting tool – it allows you to ignore and avoid the actual stressors that may be happening in your life. In my case, it was perhaps a response to a chaotic home environment and a brain that has always veered toward neurosis.
It is, of course, only with hindsight that I’m able to fully appreciate the ferocious, existential narrowing, blunting and degradation of the illness I suffered from.
Of all the factors that contributed to my bulimia, and are causing the grim state of young women’s mental health overall, social media is perhaps the most pernicious. Over the past 18 years of its existence, it has become so deeply entrenched in our lives that, to young people at least, it feels omnipresent and inescapable.
For many young women, their self-worth – at least aesthetically – is dependent to an alarming degree on comparing themselves to images of women that have been digitally altered; or conversely, unaltered images of women who have been surgically altered. A relentless torrent of pictures. It’s a degrading, dysfunctional system. Alas, it appears to be the one we’ve settled for – outsourcing the determination of our self-worth to the social media algorithms.
I’ve come to understand that neurosis, and all of the belief and behavioural systems that spring from it – are essentially the brain’s attempt at managing what would otherwise be a debilitating degree of fear, uncertainty and anxiety. Eating disorders are extraordinarily powerful in this regard, perhaps because they are often structured around quantifiable data. Weight. Calories. BMI. They all become numerical indicators of your worth or of your justification, and give the disorganised mind a sense of calm, order and control. Where there is disorder, these numbers bring order; where there is uncertainty, they promise certainty; where there is fear, they offer reassurance.
The reason I’m so concerned about socialmedia and the ways in which it distorts the self-perception of young women is that I know first-hand how those distortions can accumulate over time and develop into full-blown psychiatric conditions. My life’s a testament to what can happen when one’s self-perception becomes degraded and distorted to the point that self-annihilation seems the only answer.
Sometimes, sitting on my bathroom floor (where any prayer worth its salt is dispatched from) I’d pray to God, begging for him to kill me. My motives were twofold: I wanted, desperately, to be excused from the acute and unremitting agony of staying alive; but I’d decided early on that suicide was out of the question.
I wanted death without the inconvenience of a guilty conscience. My hands would get to stay clean. My family would recover, eventually, and they’d never have to be tormented by questions of their potential culpability, as is common in those bereaved by suicide.
It was lost on me, then, how disturbing that degree of abject desperation was. But it isn’t lost on me any more. I see it for what it was, and I’m grateful God didn’t indulge me.
I don’t go in for that “I’ve been to hell and back, believe me!” stuff; it always seems a bit self-indulgent and melodramatic in a way that’s downright un-Australian – but wherever it is I’ve been, it has fallen pretty short of heaven. As a teenager, during the most intense, brutal periods of my eating disorder, I would use social media in a consciously, intentionally dysfunctional way. You can make a weapon out of anything if you have enough masochistic drive. I weaponised my own social media feed with obsessive, self-flagellating efficiency.
It’s worth noting that I didn’t seek out websites or social media accounts that were specifically centred around eating disorders, or that were dedicated to images of emaciated women. There was simply no need to, given there was such a vast amount of those kinds of images on widely-used, mainstream sites and apps already. I primarily used Instagram and Tumblr – both massively popular websites at the time, particularly with adolescent girls.
I would search for and subject myself to countless images of attractive, emaciated, dead-eyed models so as to elicit within myself a sense of agonising shame for my comparative repulsiveness. I would then intensify and escalate my desperate, concentrated efforts to alleviate that shame through starving, bingeing and purging. It was a repetitive, compulsive, ritualistic act of self-punishment for the crime of inhabiting my own body, as opposed to one that would be deemed worthy.
As the bulimia took hold, my life became a perpetual cycle of “sin” and self-administered penance: bingeing (consumption is inherently sinful), purging (ridding oneself of the sin in an attempt to nullify it) and starvation (refusing temptation). I’m not using religious language for the sake of it; the whole experience felt laden with a profound significance that felt spiritual in nature. I thought that by transcending the flesh I’d achieve purity of the soul, or something to that (admittedly melodramatic) effect.
Divine rationalisations aside, the eating-disordered psyche becomes markedly warped over time. Like a parasite, the condition functions in a way that seeks to perpetuate itself while also endangering its host. Social media provides an ideal environment in which it can feed on endless images of gaunt-yet-glamorous women, fad diets, bogus nutritional advice and the unavoidable, incessant worship of the beauty ideal – which, of course, is inextricably tied to thinness. This socio-cultural phenomenon has been in place for a long while now – Instagram was created 15 years ago, and we’ve been more or less hooked ever since – and its cumulative impact on the psychological wellbeing of women has been disastrous.
As far as statistical indicators of harm go, the steadily climbing rate of cosmetic surgery in Australia paints a dismal picture. A 2023 study by researchers at the University of South Australia found that frequent social media use was correlated with a higher acceptance of cosmetic surgery, and young women who over-identify with perceived flaws are significantly more likely to consider it. Another report, by the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery and Medicine, reveals cosmetic procedures in Australia almost doubled between 2010 and 2018.
And for all the pain and expense of surgery, there’s little evidence it does much for self-esteem. “Even after cosmetic procedures, less than 40 per cent of women feel satisfied with their bodies,” notes Dr John Mingoia, one of the University of South Australia researchers. “If young women continue to access cosmetic surgery without addressing underlying self-compassion concerns, they may never feel content in their own body.”
In other words, maybe the “problems” that women are trying desperately to correct through surgical intervention are more than just skin deep.
Unrealistic beauty standards had a place in Western society long before the advent of social media, of course. But never before in history have we had such an effective tool with which to immerse ourselves so intensely in the vast ocean of cultural messages around beauty.
The two most crucial messages perpetuated on social media are:
1) You are not thin or attractive enough – and that’s a personal failure on your part.
2) Buy this product for a shot at redemption.
Once upon a time, you’d have to physically visit the newsagent’s to pick up a copy of Vogue or Cosmopolitan in order to get pummelled with proof that you’re lacking in the beauty department. Now we can achieve the same outcome, at 20,000 times the volume and concentration, without even rolling out of bed.
Our culture promotes, even in our modern, ostensibly “progressive” times, a prescription of feminine beauty so narrow that to pursue it is a Sisyphean task. And eating disorders are the ultimate manifestation of the struggle to attain that beauty – industrial-grade tools for emotional regulation that are most effective when they consume you entirely. Their obsessive nature demands relentless devotion to and unwavering faith in their punishing directives and endless fixations. If your illness is severe, life becomes quite simple in a strange, sad kind of way. You are concerned only with 1) your body; 2) food; and 3) your intent to starve the former and demonise the latter.
All other concerns become trivial and colourless in comparison to the core, kamikaze mission. And these “other concerns” happen to include the defining features of one’s humanity. Relationships, career, passions, education – all of them become obfuscated and dulled by the distorting power of the disease. Eventually, they no longer factor into your understanding of a meaningful life; they instead become inconvenient distractions from what you see as your central purpose.
Like any addiction, eating disorders destroy everything in their path over time, and leave you completely, interminably empty, in every possible sense. But hey, At least you’re thin. Ta-da! Cue the applause. Your trophy must be lost in the post.
For me, a measure of awareness first dawned at around the four-year mark of my illness. I realised that I’d been playing, with great fervour and determination, a losing game for a long time. The ideology I’d structured my identity around – and surrendered my life to – was self-defeating, corrosive and potentially life-threatening. The false promises of the illness had all been thoroughly, experientially disproved. And yet even after this monumental “breakthrough”, in which the scales fell from my eyes and the false beliefs at the heart of my condition were shattered, I stayed bulimic for another decade.
As Luke Davies wrote in his addiction memoir Candy, “When you can stop, you don’t want to – and when you want to stop, you can’t.”
While the “body-positive” movement has made sincere efforts to address our cultural issues around the elevation of thin bodies, by critiquing and deconstructing beauty culture, those efforts are no match for the multibillion-dollar beauty-industrial complex.
And if you think about it, the best way for us to resist a degrading cultural system that overvalues beauty is not to reactively declare: “Actually, I am beautiful! Take that, society!” If you do that, you’re still playing the same old game, just on a new patch of grass on the field. Instead, we can, on an individual basis, opt out of the dominant value system.
If we’re really sick to death of a culture that thrives on our insecurities and self-hatred, we have to ask ourselves some tough questions about our own complicity within said culture. Highlighting the predatory nature of social media algorithms is one thing; prying ourselves out of the algorithmic vortex is another. The unpleasant truth is that in using social media, we are actively participating in our own exploitation. We know it’s designed to bleed us dry – stripping us of our time, money, attention, agency and dignity. We know, too, the gnawing emptiness of scrolling and scrolling and scrolling ourselves into oblivion – searching in vain for some great unnameable thing, trying to sate some ravenous yet inexplicable hunger.
There is no one-size-fits-all prescription for an issue as pervasive, multi-faceted and complex as this. There are no quick fixes or miracle cures that can offer us immediate liberation.
But what I can tell you is that we can’t wait to be granted a permission slip from our culture that will allow us to accept, love or even remotely like ourselves. The only thing we truly have, in any meaningful sense, is time. Our time, and what we choose to do with it.
Most of the time I was ill, I was atechnically “normal” weight relative to my height and age, hovering around the mid-60kgs range. I was not sickly thin, pallid or visibly unwell; there was nothing about my appearance that would have given the game away, so to speak. This runs quite contrary to the pervasive notion that eating disorders can be detected with a cursory glance – which is to say, one must be visibly underweight in order to have one.
In reality, the kind of obvious, visible illness that people associate with eating disorders generally is a kind of visual shorthand for anorexia nervosa – though this particular disease accounts for only 3.5 per cent of the 1.1 million people with an eating disorder in Australia, according to the Butterfly Foundation.
The physical consequences that chronic bulimia exposes one to are not minor, nor quaint: they include (but are not limited to) cardiac arrhythmia, peripheral neuropathy, renal failure, oesophageal rupture and cardiac arrest. Sudden Cardiac Death is the leading cause of mortality among bulimics, followed by suicide.
Somehow, I’ve managed to avoid all of the medical complications associated with the disease. It’s difficult to reconcile the idea that after spending more than a decade relentlessly mistreating my body, I’ve yet to be met with any meaningful physiological “reprisals”.
Throughout my illness, I must have pored over the lists of its potential health consequences hundreds of times – and not once did they register as alarming to me. They didn’t make me feel apprehensive about continuing on as I had been, nor did they give me “pause”. Instead, there was a deep sense of fatalism, resignation and indifference – if I died of cardiac arrest, so be it. Survival seemed far more threatening a prospect than death at that point.
Eating disorders, like all addictions that involve physically deleterious behaviour, tend to silence the alarm bells, disable the warning signals. I experienced episodes of heart palpitations (likely due to the chronic dehydration and electrolyte imbalances associated with recurrent purging) frequently enough that I learned to dismiss and ignore them entirely.
I lived, for a long time, in a state of persistent physical discomfort and unease. I don’t mean purely the bodily exhaustion and discomfort that’s par for the course when you’re careening between the behavioural extremes – fasting, bingeing, purging – of bulimia; I’d adapted to that baseline discomfort early on. It was the sense of existential foreboding that was more disturbing. I began to develop a suspicion, or perhaps a justified fear, that the “goodwill” my body had extended to me over the course of my illness – i.e., not succumbing to serious medical illness or injury, despite my relentless self-harming – was a finite resource that was bound to run out sooner or later.
Today, far from taking my health for granted, I reflect frequently on the body’s absurdly merciful capacity for endurance and resilience, and I’m struck with a kind of reverence. I consider myself as having been medically “let off the hook” in a miraculous sense, and feel wildly undeserving of this kind of clemency. I often get the feeling of being a fugitive – forever looking over my shoulder at the righteous punishment that is my due.
Perhaps, though, unlike my psyche, my body doesn’t operate under the dominion of a cold, moral absolutism; perhaps its objectives are blessedly uncomplicated and unassailably pure: survive, survive, survive.
The final death of my illness happened gradually, over a long time. I found I was less and less compelled to binge-eat, and became resigned to the knowledge that it would be a physically arduous, emotionally punishing activity. There was no longer any “rush” to the experience; just a dull, pervasive sense of horror that I was still, after all these years, doing the same thing. It took me 14 years to catch on to the fact that the process played out in the exact same way, every single time I did it. Talk about slow on the uptake.
In the end, I just didn’t have the stamina for it. I’d wrung every last drop of psychological utility out of the disease at that point. The well had run dry. I couldn’t be bothered any more. Days, weeks passed. I realised it wasn’t something I did any more. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, it was over.
For the majority of my life, the only sentiments I was able to muster in regard to my body were hatred, repulsion and shame; now, as the illness recedes in my rearview mirror, and the perceptual distortions lift like a thick fog dissolving in the sunlight, I find that admiration, indebtedness and respect have taken their place.
Many others, though, are still trapped in the cycle. We know now that social media platforms are incentivised to algorithmically target and exploit the psychological vulnerabilities and insecurities of young women. Former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, in her recent book Careless People, describes a confidential document (leaked in 2017) that revealed the company was “offering advertisers the opportunity to target 13-to-17-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel ‘worthless’, ‘insecure’, ‘stressed’, ‘defeated’, ‘anxious’, ‘stupid’, ‘useless’, and ‘like a failure’. Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state”.
What motivates the social media giants is profit; they are not concerned, and never will be, with promoting the psychological wellbeing of young women. But again, in using social media we’re complicit with it; any efforts to make these apps more conducive to mental health – perhaps by reducing how much beauty-related content is pushed to female users – would almost certainly result in reduced user engagement and directly threaten their bottom line.
Sure, there may be the odd symbolic gesture to placate the general public (e.g., Instagram introducing the option for users to hide “like” counts on posts, in order to “depressurise people’s experience” on the platform). But let’s avoid certain death by not holding our breath waiting for substantive, meaningful changes to be made. If it ain’t broke – or more aptly, if it’s still reliably generating billions of dollars a year – why the hell would they “fix” it?
So if the social media giants won’t take responsibility for our mental wellbeing, we young women need to do it ourselves. Difficult though it may be, we do have the power to withdraw our participation in social media. Nobody is coming to pry our phones out of our hands. Instead, we must take responsibility for determining what role they play in our lives.
Lifeline 13 11 14; butterfly.org.au; nedc.com.au
