Social media and toxic body image perceptions
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Social media is an interactive virtual communication technology that has, over the passage of years, become instrumental in the creation and sharing of information, ideas and other forms of expression. The use of social media has increased significantly over the past decades and reached exponential heights during the pandemic, when the entire world was practically in a lockdown. For instance, TikTok use in Pakistan increased by 142% since 2020. Instagram and Snapchat are also free social networking platforms allowing users to upload and share photos and videos. Snapchat has around 187 million daily active users, approximately 18.8 million of those are in Pakistan. Instagram has 1158 million users worldwide, with more than 63% users between the ages of 18-34 years. As of 2022, Instagram has 13.75 million users in Pakistan.
In the past few years, various newspapers have repeatedly been publishing articles highlighting the impact of social media platforms like Snapchat Instagram and TikTok on the emotional and mental health of millennials and the impact these platforms have on how they perceive themselves. These virtual applications are equipped with filters and augmented reality tools that allows users to shape shift their faces, enhancing the lips, cheeks, skin tone as well as changing the vital statistics of the body. Hence, now more young people have started altering their physical appearance through plastic surgeries. Rhinoplasty being the top trending surgery of choice among most young people, followed by cheek, jaw and lip implants.
According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Those suffering from BDD are pre-occupied with slight or negligent imperfections in their physical appearance, and they spend on an average an hour a day obsessing about this perceived imperfection, resulting in low self-esteem and lack of confidence. These interfere with the individuals’ social, occupational and other levels of functioning. According to research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, one in 50 Americans suffers from BDD.
The basic ethos of these social media networks is the objectification of individuals, which is creating a form of mass hysteria among the youth for that perfect, though unrealistic body image.
Mehreen Mujtaba
Somewhere around 2018, the term social media dysmorphia was coined to highlight how much these social applications are influencing people, especially adolescents and young adults. Social media dysmorphia is a body image disorder characterized by a need to heavily edit one’s own digital image. At it’s more severe, the disorder may cause people to seek out cosmetic procedures in order to alter their appearance and replicate the altered images they present online as well as eating disorders.
Though a lot of data is not available in order to form an informed opinion about the extent of social media dysmorphia in Pakistan, research conducted at Agha Khan University highlights the facts that social media influences the body image perceptions among a cohort of college and university going students in the country’s largest city, Karachi. Various informal discussions among ethical clinicians, aesthetic dermatologists as well as cosmetic surgeons has highlighted the problems they face while dealing with young patients who desire changing their facial symmetry corresponding to filtered images on their social media accounts. According to a famous dermatologist working in the capital city of Islamabad, she receives scores of young women below the age of 30, who want to start getting expensive treatments like toxin injections to smoothen out their lines and fillers to enhance their features according to images of celebrities they follow on social networks as well as the heavily filtered images of their peers. She believes these young girls need psychological support in order to cope with their dysmorphic obsessive thoughts.
It is becoming a known fact that social media filters as well as celebrity endorsements of filtered images flooding networks like Instagram are a source of body dysmorphic disorder among a vast majority of millennials. The basic ethos of these social media networks is the objectification of individuals, which is creating a form of mass hysteria among the youth for that perfect, though unrealistic body image, which at some level needs to be stopped. Social media literacy, in order to critically apprise media content, messages and images, should be legally enforced on these social networking sites. The onus of responsibility also lies on clinicians, who should evaluate such clients and refer them for proper psychological analysis instead of trying to making money off them.
- Dr. Mehreen Mujtaba is a freelance consultant working in the areas of environment and health.
