Letters to the Editor
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Where did you get this detail from? Your imagination?
"Ride a subway and watch a 10-year-old girl reading a teen fashion magazine, her index finger intently tracing the outline of a waif-thin model's collagen-fattened lips, and then, with a sullen sense of defeat, examine her own reflection in the subway window."
It's pretty insulting ("intently" "sullen sense of defeat" - puleez). Did you witness this? Otherwise it is simply ridiculous to generalize such to all 10-year-old girls. News flash: Girls and women generally read magazines (just like the male gender), we don't trace with fingers what we are looking at.
Used to be a 10-year-old girl myself.
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"It's the culture, stupid"
When I was young, everything was the environment. Now everything is hardwired. Next they will identify the "genetic predisposition" to BDD. Anyone see fad-driven science here?
An excellent article, exemplary in how you dismantle one of these inane studies.
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Quite right,
and an immensely important topic. It leads naturally to broader questions around the real meaning, use, and function of the medical model and the construct “psychiatric disorder” as codified in the DSM-IV and as related ultimately to power to pathologize, social control, aggression, and yes, patriarchy. Example: Bruce Levin’s recent piece over at Alternet on the over-use of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) to label, pathologize, and medicate kids who react to oppressive parenting and systems. Example: a female celebrity who no longer meets our needs and expectations is “mentally ill”, while adult males who lie and manipulate a nation into killing hundreds of thousands of innocents are “leaders” or “administration officials”.
With BDD, as in behavioral, addictive, and other disorders, the medical model is less concerned with etiology and effective treatment than with avoiding any real look at the social and environmental correlates of dysphoria and disordered behavior – that would lead to very dangerous places and indict and threaten much larger systems.
This is important and useful deconstruction. Ultimately it will help dispel even the myths around schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. They are neither diseases nor of the brain, but instead like BDD, represent maladaptive expressions of evolved, protective responses to toxic, invalidating, and threatening environments.
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BDD is not a matter of excessive vanity
This article seems to gloss over what BDD actually is to make its point. By definition (DSM IV), BDD is not a disease that is caused by vanity or an inability to live up to a cultural ideal of beauty. People with BDD either imagine a non-existent defect in appearance or have a grossly exaggerated reaction to a minor defect (such as a mole). Here is an interesting study comparing American college students with German students. http://psy.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/43/6/486. The study showed the Americans placed greater importance on their looks and were much more likely to feel inadequate. Nevertheless, the rate of BDD in both groups was the same.
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Purest Conjecture
Pointing out the study's inability to prove causation (only correlation) was pretty good. Following up this point with complete conjecture about the actual causation was pretty bad, even condescending. Psychiatry: guilty of offering somewhat less insight than advertised - but making progress. Psychology: guilty of wholesale fabrication of dangerous, untestable theories for over a hundred years.
The logical extension of your "looks-based society" theory is that BDD is the fault of bad parents, who, you know, don't do enough to protect their precious dumplings from the dangerous social paradigm (ie. indoctrinating them into the dominant feminist/psychologist victim myth du jour). I look forward to the day when we're allowed to find some men and women more attractive than others, for even the shallowest reasones, without being scolded that we're responsible for the suicidal anorexia & steroid addictions of countless impressionable others.
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Vanity and ego
Some people are only comfortable on the surface of everything. There are magazines for sale in many bookstores that are entirely about cosmetic surgery.
I find them disgusting.
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Wow.
It's sad how excited I was to find this article. "Wow; an article about the really obscure mental disorder that I've been diagnosed with!" I said. I'm even more impressed that it's kind of a weirdly scholarly article.
As a guy with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (which itself is rare; most sufferers are women), I have say that I've come to a few conclusions about BDD over the years:
1) BDD really sucks.
2) It never occured to me that it was genetic. I was kind of a funny-looking nerd in high school, jerks made fun of me for years for being a funny-looking nerd, as jerks will, and now I'm obsessive about my appearence. I continually fear being called funny-looking, and obsess very oddly, for hours a day, about my hair - specifically, only my hair; even though friends, girlfriends, etc., have assured me that I'm not funny-looking, that my hair is normal, etc...
3) BDD really really sucks. It prevents me from going outside, has cost me jobs, girlfriends, friends... and very nearly led me to kill myself.
4) Actually having BDD may be different from what you think it would be like. It's a very weird thing to have. The best comparison/analogy I can think of is this:
You have a blind date coming up in fifteen minutes. But you've just, say, eaten a huge amount of garlic, and, oh, let's say, sushi. Your breath smells awful, basically.
So you start brushing your teeth before your date. But where you would normal stop after a minute or two, now you're worried. You do a couple of sniff tests; but no you're not sure. Does your breath smell okay? How can you be sure? You don't want to mess up your date, and you're running out of time, and you need to leave soon, but you keep brushing and brushing and brushing... you can't stop. And now you're late for your date; you're ruining the very thing that you were worried about in the first place.
But how can you stop? When is your breath clean enough? When is enough brushing? It's a hard question to answer.
5) BDD's sort of like that, if that makes sense. It's like being afraid all of the time. What is normal-looking? What is good-looking enough? And if you've been made fun of for being ugly before, couldn't it always happen again, at any moment? As you can see, this starts to get a little weird and existential, after a while...
6) Anyway, that's it. I'm not saying that I know where it comes from or how to treat it. (Drugs? Endless therapy?) And I'm not saying there's a good solution. (Can we really all make ourselves believe that everyone is equally good-looking; that no one is unattractive? That seems hard to do, no? And that idea sort of seems to contradict some of our genetic hard-wiring.)
...I'm just saying, it's a weird thing to have. And if anyone else out there who's reading this has it, write in, and let me know what's going on with you.
best,
Oliver Miller
oliveramiller@hotmail.com
www.nerve.com/videoblog