body dysmorphic disorder

[ForeverFighting]

From Reuters Health

People with body dysmorphic disorder are 45 times more likely to commit suicide than people in the general population, a new study shows....Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, have a distorted body image and think obsessively about their appearance, often for hours a day, explained Phillips, who is at Butler Hospital and Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island.

The disorder frequently leads to self-loathing and social isolation, she added. It is not uncommon for people with BDD to tell no one about their condition, even a spouse or very close friends.

I have that. I didn't know there was a name for it, but I have it. Interestingly, I also ran into a study done in Germany called BeautyCheck , where they found that the people we're modeling ourselves after, the beauty characteristics I think I have to have in order to fit into this world or whatever, don't exist. At all.

Does anybody else deal with this? It's not vanity. It's like it says, a self-loathing because I cannot possibly look like I'm supposed to.

Just curious.

 

[bp83]

yeah...I definitely have that...maybe not as severe as others, but I have it. For about 2 years, I obsessed on my appearance so much...I lost 65 pds. in weight and got down to 114 pds. (I'm 5' 7.5"). After this, I felt like I looked good for the first time in a long time, but then, my hair started thinning...and I've been severely depressed because of it. People had started telling me great things like I looked like Justin Timberlake and Ryan Phillippe (I had curly longer hair), now I have to keep it short and I've put on about 20 pds. more than I should have gained. So yeah, I obsess about the way I look and it only adds to my sexuality problems.

 

[ForeverFighting]

I read more about this, and I guess it's more about being obsessed with one physical feature to the point that you'd have surgery to fix it. That's not me. I just obsess. Always seeing myself through others' eyes. I'm not muscular enough, not thin enough, wrong facial features, stupid hair--that kind of thing. Anorexia runs in my family--not genetically, but mentally. My great-aunt had it, my sister leaned that way, and I used to freak if I gained a pound. It makes me selfish where I end up focusing more on how I look and don't comment on how other people look. So I'm always adjusting my posture, always conscious of my belly, holding my face a certain way so the lines don't show. It's very annoying and exhausting. I also think that's a reason I search the web for photos of beautiful men, so I can make one more adjustment--whatever it might be--to look the way they look. And because nobody looks the perfect look, and age pursues us like a rabid wildabeast, the obsession can prove to be nothing but a futile failure. Thus depression.

So why do we do this to ourselves? And how does a person let go and just be human? How do we focus on the good we are inside instead of whatever our abusive families did to us to think we're only what we look like outside?

 

[ForeverFighting]

How funny. Here's an article that puts it well. It's from the Harvard Gazette.

Disorders of body image, including a pathological preoccupation with muscularity, are growing increasingly common among Western males, notes Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, a Harvard senior. "By contrast, such male body-image problems appear to be rare in Asian societies."

Media displays add to such cultural differences. For example, Yang points out, in the United States, men's health and fitness magazines are often crowded with steroid-enhanced muscular images. In comparison, he found no comparable Taiwanese magazines in a search of some of that country's largest bookstores.

Another possible factor centers on the importance of men's roles as breadwinners, soldiers, and business leaders. In the West, that image has plunged precipitously in the past few decades. Women now command spaceships and serve as CEOs of large corporations. Pope and Yang suggest that, to compensate, some Western men are fixating on muscularity as "the last bastion of masculinity."

It always comes back to a lack of feeling power in life, doesn't it? So if I felt some control in my life...? I'd care less about looking the part?