When the mirror is your cruelest friend and closest foe
In the last few years, mental health awareness has been afforded a platform it was long excluded from, by both the public and even medical communities. Conversations between advocates, experts, and the public surrounding treatment and support have helped to destigmatize disorders like depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder — but we still have a long way to go in terms of understanding the complexities of disordered thinking.
Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a mental health disorder in which a person suffers from an intense dislike of one or more of their physical features, often scrutinizing it for hours on end. It can cause the sufferer to self-isolate from society to hide their perceived deformations; other symptoms include excessive grooming, skin picking, mirror-checking, and even repetitive cosmetic surgeries. In reality, the features they scrutinize might go unnoticed by most, if not all, people, but their mind can only attribute monstrous qualities to their appearance.
According to Psychology Today, an online publication, body dysmorphia is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and though it’s not an eating disorder, it can co-occur with a person who suffers from one. Eating disorders and BDD target the sufferer’s self-esteem and body image, which can result in disordered eating in order to regain control of their appearance. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has left many people vulnerable because of mandated quarantines or self-isolation, which can be especially hard for someone suffering from body dysmorphia. The ritual of scrutinizing and altering their appearance without interruption can be detrimental to their mental health, and can contribute to worsening anxiety, disordered eating habits, and even suicide.
The woes of social media stretch far: weaponizing misinformation during elections, privacy concerns, censorship, unmonitored abuse from trolls. But even when used casually, social media has managed to have a dramatic effect on the mental health of many because of how it can encourage habits of self-scrutiny, bullying, and seeking others’ approval — it can be especially harmful to someone who can alter their appearance with filters or photo-editing apps in order to correct their imagined ugliness. Frequent exposure to social media can lead to body dissatisfaction, and it seems to be a potential trigger for someone with BDD. This impulse can lead to worsening symptoms such as compulsively seeking cosmetic surgery, which is ultimately ineffective in relieving distress caused by BDD, as someone with a disordered view of themselves will never be satisfied with one procedure and will refocus their scrutiny elsewhere. Regardless of someone’s actual appearance, the severity of their BDD symptoms can still vary from mild to extreme.
Someone suffering with BDD requires medical treatment in order to recover. The International OCD Foundation recommends that sufferers seek cognitive behavioural treatment with a licensed therapist, who will also determine what sort of medication may be needed in order to help patients cope with these intrusive thoughts.
Body dysmorphia can be easily dismissed because people can mistakenly empathize with it as body insecurity, but the disorder is more complicated than that. The hyper-fixation over perceived flaws isn’t body insecurity — it’s a compulsion that consumes the sufferer. The disorder cannot be fixed or eased with outside encouragement, whether that comes from friends, family, or an online forum. In the same way that a person with depression cannot uplift their mood through sheer willpower, nor can a person with an anxiety disorder dismiss their fears or panic. Only a desire for recovery paired with therapy or medication, or both, can help a BDD patient improve their quality of life.
