We don’t understand why you’re here. You should be dead.

These horrifying words were spoken to Ashlee Thomas, a fourteen year old girl, as she was admitted into the hospital weighing less than 99% of people her age. The doctor wasn't being cruel. He was just in shock, and for good reason: during her stay in the hospital, Ashlee Thomas´s heart failed her twice.

Why, one might ask, was Thomas in this situation? It was not due to cancer, or to some sort of rare, contagious disease, but it was due to something just as deadly: anorexia nervosa. According to the National Institutes of Health, anorexia nervosa affects up to 3% of young women (although less common, anorexia among males is also highly dangerous) and has the highest mortality rate of any psychic disorder.

Approximately 10.2 thousand people die from anorexia each year- this number equates to about one person every 52 minutes (Medical News Today). Furthermore, in the less than two decades between 2000 and 2018, eating disorder diagnoses nearly doubled.

To sufferers of anorexia and bulimia, the relationship with food is a dangerous, terrifying, and broken one. Anorexia is classified in the DSM-5 as a disturbance characterized by a ¨restriction of energy intake¨ as well as an ¨intense fear of.. becoming fat¨ .

Bulimics, meanwhile, often ingest large quantities of food at once and then respond by ¨purging¨ or attempting to rid oneself of the calories and therefore the weight one may potentially gain as a result of the binge. Both of these eating disorders are terrifically dangerous- however, one may notice that several common driving factors: a wish to alter your body shape and a fear of weight gain, are not only present in eating disorder sufferers but in the majority of the population as well: particularly adolescents.

Image Credit: Diana Polekhina from Unsplash

While an eating disorder is a complex illness that cannot in any way be considered due solely to one cause, there is one new and ever changing presence that permanently alters the way we see our bodies: social media. According to Good Health Psych, 75% of adolescent females and 70% of adolescent males have at least one social media account. And of this group, 52% of girls and 45% of guys will engage in an unhealthy or restrictive method of weight loss (e.g. meal skipping, over-exercising) following viewing of content. In another study (NEDA), high school students who spend two hours or more a day on social media are 60% more likely to experience self-perception and body image issues.

Furthermore, several experiments in PMC and the Tracking Our Lives Study, respectively, further illustrated the connection between a distorted perception of self and the influence of idealized beauty in the media. In the first study, females were exposed to images of models of relatively slim, midsized, and larger women, and it was reported that the former experiment immediately resulted in a significantly lower view of one's own body in comparison to the other two.

This effect was stronger for teenagers under the age of 19, one of the most explicit messages that the way we browse and view content does affect us. And unfortunately for us, we are statistically much more likely to run into the first kind of picture- as described in Science Daily, 90% of young women have used filters or editing to ¨better¨ the way they appear in a photo (make it more conforming to society's expectations.)

Image Credit: kyle smith from Unsplash

“I would say there were so many contributing factors [to my anorexia] , but one of the major ones would have been social media,¨ says Thomas (Daily Mail). “I think I was in denial, and I never thought there was an issue because losing weight and wanting to be healthy is so glamorized in the world we live in today that I just thought I was doing what everyone else was doing.¨

A similar experience was shown in the case study of teenager Anastasia Vlasova, whose own experience with anorexia nervosa was intensified by Instagram´s continuous pushing of ¨clean eating¨ and ¨the ideal body type¨ onto her (CNN). Now describing her affiliation with social media as an ¨unhealthy obsession¨, Vlasova maintains that Instagram damaged her mental well being. ¨I was exposed to the highly unregulated, like side of Instagram, where there were fitness influencers and nutritionists who weren’t necessarily qualified to be giving advice, especially to like a 13, 14 year old who’s on Instagram and their body is changing.¨ When asked about her current stance on youth and social media, she states (RF) , ¨I just think it’s really dangerous to have access to something on a daily, if not hourly basis… these are some of the most critical years of our lives.¨

Both Thomas and Vaslova have gone on to make complete recoveries, distancing themselves from social media and instead focusing on their own mental health, anxieties, and relationships with their bodies.

Thomas and Vaslova now advocate to destigmatize mental illness and create a more positive space for girls to talk about their bodies. “I know that desperation to want to look a certain way and it’s so sad,” Ashlee says. ¨And as soon as you reach it you feel even worse about yourself.”