Mental Health Notes

Psychologists Unsure Of Media Influence On Eating Disorders

by Alicia Sparks, NAMI Affiliation Leader on April 16th, 2008

Unless you’re willing to pay a $71,000-fine and spend up to three years in prison, it’s best to avoid encouraging “extreme thinness” in France.

According to two Yahoo! News articles, the lower house of the French parliament adopted a bill on Tuesday that would apply these punishments to anyone who incites extreme thinness. “Anyone,” more specifically, includes:

• Fashion magazines
• Advertisers
• Web sites

Critics claim “the bill is too vague about whom it is targeting and doesn’t even clearly define ‘extreme thinness,’” while the president of the French Federation of Couture, Didier Grumbach, vows:

“Never will we accept in our profession that a judge decides if a young girl is skinny or not skinny […] That doesn’t exist in the world, and it will certainly not exist in France.”

For the most part, doctors and psychologists seem to have “welcomed the government’s efforts to fight self-inflicted starvation”; however, they “warned the link with media images is hazy.”

Brigham Young University psychology professor Marleen S. Williams seems to agree, stating that it’s “nearly impossible to prove that the media causes eating disorders,” and goes a step further to point out France’s shortcoming during this creation of this bill:

Williams said studies show fewer eating disorders in “cultures that value full-bodied women.” Yet with the new French legal initiative, she fears, “you’re putting your finger in one hole in the dike, but there are other holes, and it’s much more complex than that.”

I can only assume the “other holes” Williams is referring to are things such as counseling and psychiatric services to women (and possibly men - let’s not discriminate!) who suffer with eating disorders, as well as using the media to correct itself, so to speak, such as my friend Kat suggests:

“I think they’d do better to put the money into a publicity campaign encouraging realistic body images and healthy living […]”

For more information about eating disorders, safely losing weight, and proper nutrition, I recommend Breaking the Mirror, Weighting Line, and Eating Fabulous.

Sources: France may make it illegal to promote extreme thinness and French bill takes aim at those who glamorize the ultra-thin.

The image above is owned by exfordy and is being used according to these Creative Commons attributions.

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POSTED IN: Anorexia Nervosa, Current Affairs & News, Eating Disorders, Government & Politics, Resources, Sites of Interest, Women