From charity head shave to anorexia: Katya Jaski’s warning on toxic social media
Katya Jaski shaved her hair for cancer charity at 13, then cruel taunts and toxic TikTok algorithms triggered a devastating eating disorder that nearly killed her.
As a big-hearted 13-year-old raising money for cancer, Katya Jaski chose to shave her long, light-brown hair.
In front of classmates at her bayside school in Melbourne, she bravely let a staff member use clippers to give her a buzz cut.
Sandringham College’s newsletter at the time heralds the teenager’s support for this “wonderful cause” and happily reports that her fellow students cheered her on.
But Katya’s beautiful gesture also sparked an ugly response. Almost immediately, classmates started to taunt her with cruel remarks about her new crop.
“I got comments at school that I looked like a boy and I looked like an egg,” says the now-19-year-old.
This was as Covid hit in March 2020. The impressionable young Year 7 student was forced into isolation at her Brighton home under Melbourne’s strict lockdowns with “a lot of insecurities” ringing through her mind.
“Like most teenage girls, I was just wanting to fit in,” says Katya, who signed up to TikTok in search of hair-growth tips.
“That was something that I’d always struggled with somewhat.”
Before long, those first innocent TikTok searches for hair tips fell prey to the social media site’s often-toxic algorithms. They thrust the new teen into an endless scroll of fitness and “glow-up” videos.
There was post after post of perfectly presented influencers sharing what they were eating in a day.
Others offering weight-busting “green” recipes or transforming workout regimens. Updating followers on their weight loss or body checks.
“It’s not deliberately trying to harm somebody but for a 13-year-old girl who’s seeing that, it does put up a lens for comparison. You know, this is what this person does in a day. What do I do in a day? Maybe I’m not doing enough,” reflects Katya.
“So being quite impressionable and hearing that this fitness workout will make you unrecognisable when we come out of lockdown, I’m thinking, ‘Maybe this is what I need to do to make people like me’. I just wanted to make friends.
“At first I was working out and I was watching what I was eating but not super obsessively.
“There were sort of signs that started popping up – thinking that I’d had too much dinner and counting my calories and making sure that I had x amount of workout that day.”
What began so innocently quickly took a menacing turn.
The content Katya found herself being exposed to in her social media feeds became evermore dangerous and “intentionally harmful”.
She was directed to pages on TikTok and Instagram that were “dedicated to eating disorders and competing with each other”.
“It’s not a pretty place,” she says.
“You share photos of your body online to gain praise from other people in the community for being thin and that’s where it’s overtly harmful.
“Images of bodies that are sick and people are commenting underneath saying, ‘I wish I looked like you, I’m so jealous.’
“They’re not saying ‘I worked out, I ate healthy.’ It’s, ‘I ate four grapes for breakfast, rice cakes for lunch and nothing for dinner.’
“I began to view more directly that being thinner or sicker was better.”
Katya limited herself to just one small meal a day and exercised obsessively.
Before long, the young teen’s mum picked up on signs that there were problems with her eating, despite her best attempts to mask them by pretending to finish her meals.
In October 2020 – seven months after Melbourne’s first Covid lockdown sparked Katya’s TikTok obsession – she was diagnosed with anorexia.
By this stage, the disease had become a “monster” with its own menacing personality.
Katya describes it as like having two brains – one is her normal self, the other is controlled by her eating disorder.
When that loomed large and took over her thoughts and actions, she blew up into a rage.
“If someone tried to give me some food, it was like a switch flicks and I’d go from being me and in the blink of an eye become someone unrecognisable,” she says.
“The eating disorder made me so angry, so unlike myself … out of control.”
With the diagnosis, Katya started to log victories. She would gain weight and re-establish healthier eating patterns.
But whenever she started to spiral or found herself at a low ebb, she was lured back to those harmful social media platforms, where she connected with – and competed against – other young people struggling with eating disorders.
And that only made things worse.
“It was a way to sort of connect with other people who were not just going through the same thing as you but actively encouraging it,” she says.
In August 2021, a scared Katya was taken to hospital for the first time. She found the clinical process – which involved having her meals monitored – “very traumatising”.
Over the next 14 months, the teen was admitted another 12 times, spending her 15th and 16th birthdays on a ward full of other girls with eating disorders.
She made friends – and lost them.
“I was in and out constantly, a revolving-door patient. I was thinking ‘I’ll just pretend to get better again’,” she says.
“It sort of got to the point where I’d be discharged from hospital and I knew I would be back there within the month.”
As she rode that debilitating hurdy-gurdy, social media played a dangerous role with the “glamorisation of hospital and feeding tubes and the whole process”.
“A lot of people think that you’re not actually sick unless you go to hospital and I think that was my perspective for a while,” she says.
“It was a goal for me to sort of go to hospital.”
Katya spent her last night in hospital in November 2022.
Six months later, her friend Liv Evans – who had shared many nights with her in hospital – died from anorexia nervosa.
Today, Katya has been in recovery for more than two years. She still suffers ups and downs during “bad weeks”.
“I have to be very cautious and conscious around ‘Am I subconsciously watching what I eat or am I restricting or are these thoughts sort of coming back?’,” she says.
“It still can be a very tolling process sometimes.”
But generally Katya feels in control of her health.
In that strong space, she is able to reflect on her illness – and the incendiary role social media played in it.
She had signed up for Instagram when she was 11 but wasn’t “really active” until Covid lockdowns struck.
By then, she was 13 – above the historically accepted age limit for social media but far too young to deal with the onslaught of dangerous content.
Acknowledging that now, Katya attributes it to the trauma of being part of Gen Z’s pioneering digital generation.
The first to grow up with social media – and to pay the price for being exposed to its dangers at such a young, impressionable age.
“I would say there was that sort of impact on me. I can’t say whether or not I would have still gotten an eating disorder without being exposed to social media, but I think I would confidently be able to say that it wouldn’t have gotten as bad,” says Katya, who took part in a parliamentary meeting about body image among young people when she was just 15.
“I don’t think there’s enough words to describe the damage that they could do to some young people.
“It wasn’t the only factor, but it did play a really important role, and I think whenever I was getting better, but then starting to spiral again, those platforms would be where I turned to.
“There are countless stories of people like me where I definitely have suffered negative impacts directly and indirectly related to social media. I feel like this generation is bearing the brunt.”
Looking to the future, Katya is backing new federal government laws – brought about by News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids campaign – that will ban social media for under-16s from December 10.
She knows the ban will be unpopular with those under-16s who will be forced to give up their social media accounts when the law changes.
But she says she wishes that control had been in place when she was younger.
“For young people, they’re just not quite mature enough to be able to comprehend these things in a way that a more developed person might be able to,” she says.
“If you don’t know what social media is … ignorance is bliss.
“The tricky part is what about the kids who are on social media and all of their friends are on social media, and then taking that away from them … that might lead to more harm than good.
“But overall my general consensus would be, ‘Yes, I think that it would have been good if I and the rest of my generation hadn’t been exposed to such things at an early age’.”
She has faith that the coming media ban will improve things for future generations of children.
“Hopefully (the ban) can make it better for them and hopefully prevent that physical and mental toll on a young person,” she says.
“Hopefully this is going to be a big step in the right direction.”
If you or someone you know needs help, call Lifeline on 1311 14 or visit lifeline.org.au
More Coverage
Originally published as From charity head shave to anorexia: Katya Jaski’s warning on toxic social media
Top SA private colleges reveal fee hikes for next school year
