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What is it about food, that it can be a source of both comfort and torment – and what is its link with mental health?
For most of us, our social media feeds are the first areas our attention is directed at in the morning and the last places we go to before falling asleep at night.
But mental health experts are sounding warning bells of perhaps an unintended consequence of photo-sharing sites such as Instagram or Facebook where projections of seemingly ideal bodies and lives may just be glamourising a silent killer – eating disorders.
At least three specialists in the fields of psychiatry, psychology and occupational therapy agreed that while social media may not be the only reason people develop eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, it may be a significant trigger.
Psychologist Sophia Combrink says eating disorders are “very, very complex” and combine biological, personality and emotional components that swirl around one’s relationship with food.
“I don’t think social media glamorises eating disorders; I think it glamorises the thing that causes eating disorders. So the looks, and this idea that if you look a certain way you will feel and be happy and accepted by society,” she says.
“People on social media will present themselves (or their lives) as ideal and they don’t at all emphasise the hardship, pain and suffering and emotional anguish people go through to look a particular way, nor the interpersonal conflict that it causes.”
Professor Christopher Paul Szabo – a leading local and international expert on eating disorders – said there was a “real versus ideal” disconnection between average body sizes and types in real life versus the often unattainable ideals portrayed in the media and social media.
In 2004 Szabo co-authored a cross-cultural study of eating attitudes in adolescent females in South Africa, citing that the disorders – according to published literature on white women at least – dated back to the 1970s.
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But his research had found that eating disorders affected both black and white young women – resulting in similar behaviours and attitudes irrespective of race – and weren’t limited to urban or Western settings.
It was also not just limited to women – but men too, who were often under pressure to lose weight or build muscle.
According to the South African Society of Psychiatrists, eating disorders are broadly defined as “the unhealthy preoccupation with eating, food, weight, exercise or body image, together with behaviours such as restriction of intake, excessive exercise, binge eating or purging, that impact on quality of life and the ability to function in daily life. They are most prevalent in teenage and young adult women.”
Combrink says that for people with eating disorders, “it becomes absolutely the focus of their lives”.
“They hardly focus on anything else other than how much they weigh, how they can be thinner.”
But what is it about food that it can be a source of both comfort and torment – and what’s its link with mental health?
Sarah Lamont, COPE manager at the Akeso Crescent Clinic, Randburg, put it like this: “From birth, the sensation of a full tummy for most people elicits a feeling of comfort and nurturance. This is why most of us enjoy a nice meal, chocolate or a nice coffee and can experience it as uplifting or making us feel ‘better’.”
But, she qualified: “The core to the eating disorder is that the individual no longer sees food as nurturance.
“The relationship with food and their body image is distorted in different ways in the different behaviours and this is dependent on the individual’s personality type, life experiences, traumas, age, levels of anxiety and depression.”
According to Combrink, only 5% of our population are diagnosed with an actual eating disorder – but, having said that, she added that they were underdiagnosed because many never seek treatment and, therefore, there are more people than we know who suffer from these disorders.
The spotlight recently turned on to the role of social media, such as photo-sharing platform Instagram, in relation to “glamourising” or even “promoting self-harm”.
All graphic images of self-harm will be removed from Instagram, the head of the social media platform, Adam Mosseri, vowed to the BBC last month.
This, after the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017, said Instagram had “helped kill” his daughter. The family had found that she had been viewing graphic images of self-harm on the site prior to her death.
Also last month in the UK, The Guardian reported that there had been a “dramatic rise” in hospital admissions for potentially life-threatening eating disorders last year, prompting concern from experts about a growing crisis of young people experiencing anorexia and bulimia.
On the role it could have on exacerbating eating disorders, Lamont said: “Information is all over different websites and in different contexts that young teenage girls and boys can follow. These sites then give tips on how to lose weight or gain muscle and suggest that the ultimate goal is thinness; it is an achievement and a yardstick for happiness.
“This re-emphasises the already very competitive environment that our young people are growing up in and so can be very dangerous. The perspective of healthy bodies can thus be very distorted by these sites and, for people who are struggling, these sites are very suggestive on how to solve their problems in unhealthy ways.”
But, social media could also have a more positive effect.
“It can be helpful in that information, education, can be available and you can use it to help people understand how they can deal with their eating disorders. I often see posts of people who have turned their lives around in some aspect, and that can be a source of inspiration.
“In addition to therapy, if somebody has a role model on social media whom they follow and has overcome the same issue, and is positive, I really think that could be powerful,” Combrink noted.
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