The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - The Hidden Perils of Obsessing Over Your Body
Episode Date: October 29, 2024The unrelenting chase for the perfect body is on the rise in young people today, in females and now in males and non-binary youths as well. Join former ballet dancer Victoria Gracie and mental health ...expert Kyle Ganson as they explore the deep emotional impact of body and muscle dysmorphia disorder in young people and what we can do to start to help them. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Social media, not surprisingly, is like a huge component to kind of any type of body image.
You see hundreds, maybe even thousands of faces and bodies that are really unrealistic
on any given day. My name is Kyle Genson. My research and my academic career focuses on
understanding eating disorders, body image,
muscle dysmorphia, substance use behaviours, particularly among young people and young
boys and men.
My name is Victoria Gracie.
I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto and I'm with a laboratory at the
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health as well as Temerty Faculty of Medicine where
we study body image disorders such as body dysmorphic disorder. I'm also a fashion model and I write a lot
about my experience with body dysmorphic disorder.
I don't exactly like how I have my face positioned
in this one here.
I feel like my chin looks a little bit off at the side.
It's kind of funky.
In order to be diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder, muscle dysmorphia,
you'd have to be diagnosed by a general practitioner, a medical doctor, a psychiatrist.
In Ontario, those would be the main people who would provide that diagnosis.
We've started to look at muscle dysmorphia.
Particular males who use social media at higher levels,
so are on there more time during the day, for example, have greater symptoms of muscle dysmorphia.
A lot of young people are looking at exercise videos
or actually using social media as a mechanism
to understand and learn how to gain muscle
and what type of exercises to use
and what type of dietary practices to use.
So it's actually a huge information source
for a lot of young males
as they're trying to increase their muscle mass.
The difference between biodysmorphia and muscle dysmorphia is very little actually.
Someone has a diagnosis of biodysmorphia, they might be specified to have muscle dysmorphia
because their preoccupation is around muscularity versus a different type of preoccupation like
one's hair or one's facial features or other parts of their body that they might have
some obsessive kind of compulsive thoughts around.
I was told that I was too big to be a ballet dancer.
Now interestingly enough,
I was also told that everything was wrong with my body
aside from my waist.
And in spite of that, my primary concern was my waist.
I feel like my waist kinda looks bigger at the side,
particularly my lower waist, sometimes bugs me a bit.
In order to help people who have
Biodysmorphic Disorder or Muscle Dysmorphia
or any type of condition,
certainly I always recommend this idea
of respectful curiosity.
Joining with them in the process,
really aligning with them and trying to understand
what's going on for them in their minds, really aligning with them and trying to understand what's
going on for them in their minds, how they're feeling about themselves.
I try not to go too much into it.
So much of Biodysmorphic Disorder, Muscle Dysmorphia, is so much related to one's body.
And so there's a lot of, I think, shame around that.
There's a lot of stigma around how bodies are presented.
A lot of expectations around, so from from society about how bodies should look.
And so I think people often feel very ashamed about the preoccupation they might have about certain flaws.
Yeah. Um...
Does this cause shame?
A little bit. A little bit.
Does this cause shade in you? Little bit, little bit.
So when I was around 13 years old,
and I was told I was too big to be a ballet dancer,
and I would say I started thinking about my body
through being in the ballet industry.
It wasn't before then that I really thought
much about my body.
I was a kid, I was living life,
but by being in an industry that's very
artistic that's very dependent on having a certain look, and that look being put upon
very young women and parents with the best intentions, putting their kids in that thinking,
this is a great activity, but in reality, behind closed doors, there's this pressure
that occurs that many people don't know about. And for me, that was the start of it, right?
So that's not to say that everybody in ballet
or in, say, an industry that has these ideals
is going to face BDD specifically.
Negative body image? That's quite likely, but not necessarily BDD.
So muscle dysmorphia falls underneath Biodysmorphorphic disorder, and there's lots of debate kind
of in the field about whether it should be classified as a sort of specifier of biodysmorphic
disorder, which to get technical falls underneath the obsessive compulsive disorders in the
diagnostic and statistical manual.
The DSM is a diagnostic manual that people like clinicians, psychiatrists, psychologists
use when diagnosing
people. It gives a list of all the symptoms and it's supposed to really outline every
psychiatric disorder that we know of.
People with osteoporosis often see themselves as much smaller than you or I might see them.
We might see them as like, wow, that person is quite large or quite strong or quite cut
or lean, but they see themselves
in the mirror as being insufficiently muscular.
So body image ideals have existed long before we have even existed.
Before us there was Venus figurines, which are basically stone cut figures that Neanderthals
sometimes would actually make as well as early humans. and they were meant to represent a female figure,
and it was a very old-formed woman,
and she was considered the ideal of that time.
When we're looking at, say, advertising,
so more similar to, say, social media,
the rise of the ideal woman
really came in with the Gibson girls,
and that was around the late 1800s.
They were corseted, they had these tiny, tiny waist, they had perfect skin, glowing
complexion, curled hair up in these pompadours, looking perfect for Steen,
always playing sports too. They loved golf and tennis and they would have
several children on top of living this amazing lifestyle. And that really became the model. And from there we used, say, models. It's really when brands try
to create an image next to impossible for people to attain, and that's to encourage the consumer
to buy into their products, hoping that they'll look like that ideal, which is really impossible
to look like. And it puts people in this endless loop of trying to obtain that ideal look. With muscle dysmorphia we kind of
idealize a muscular body especially for males like that is the male muscular
ideal it represents a strong masculine man it's seen in the gym and a lot of
our spaces as like very powerful and very important. That differentiation of when is it problematic
and when is it not is really murky.
Like is that person abusing steroids?
Oh okay, that could be dangerous.
But if they're working out five or six days a week,
they're changing their eating habits,
they are really obsessed with wanting to get more muscular,
they're still going to school
and participating in social activities.
You know, is that problematic?
I don't know.
I think teasing out that piece is really hard and I think we're still trying to do that.
Social media has really wired us to think that, you know, we do a lot of value into
the like count, the common count, what people are saying about us out there.
And you know, it's a trap with social media in general
for people with BDD and for people without BDD.
And it really gets us thinking about our supposed self-worth
in the context of our physical appearance many times
when it comes to those selfies and those photos.
And I can't tell you what the impacts of that are.
I don't know, nobody knows.
There's a definite need for more understanding of the treatment of Biodysmorphic Disorder,
also dysmorphia. Unfortunately, there's not a plethora of clinicians that are experts
in this field or know how to treat it in an effective way. And so that is a kind of also
additional barrier that I think we have to understand and kind of get over. And that
also just kind of emphasizes the need for just a supportive environment for that
person from family, from partners, from friends and their social environment. you