|
The 1983 death of anorexic pop singer Karen Carpenter first alerted the American public to the deadly danger of eating disorders. But today celebrities and their eating disorders are frequent topics for Hollywood gossip sheets, TV shows and online blogs.
“The media reflect and exacerbate the problems,” argues Ellen Rome, a pediatrician in Cleveland and spokeswoman for the Chicago-based Academy for Eating Disorders. “These teen girls watch and read and observe and emulate.”
Psychologist Douglas Bunnell, a past president of the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), agrees. However, he cautions, by portraying the most extreme cases, the media can end up “marginalizing the illness.” He says his patients will look at scrawny celebrity photos and conclude, “ 'See, I'm not anorexic. I am not like that.' ”
On the other hand, Bunnell adds, “When they put Mary-Kate Olsen, Lindsay Lohan or whoever the star of the moment is who has an eating disorder out there, they are showing how shocking it is, and how people shouldn't develop these disorders.”
New York psychotherapist Steven Levenkron, who treated Carpenter before her death, wrote in a 2001 book that in some cases the media attention balloons “into circus sideshows,” becoming “a spectator sport for the non-afflicted public.”
Kate Dillon became a plus-size model after battling anorexia as a super-thin model. (Getty Images/Nick Elgar)
|
The tribulations of Rachel and Clare Wallmeyer, 34-year-old Australian twins who have been fighting anorexia for 20 years, have been chronicled on TV in their homeland for years and became a story for U.S. entertainment shows in 2005. At one point, the twins lived on watermelon, Diet Coke and at least 20 laxatives a day, and their combined weight was 105 pounds. Since 2003, the U.S. show “Entertainment Tonight” has been following the treatment of former TV reporter Melissa Dehart, who at one point dropped to 56 pounds.
But media coverage of eating disorders is not new. Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey covered the story of Rudine, a woman who died in 1995 weighing only 38 pounds, while Maury Povich hosted the anorexic twins Michaela and Samantha Kendall. Michaela died in 1994 and Samantha died three years later.
Model Kate Dillon said she got the idea to purge from a TV movie. At five feet 11 inches tall and a size 4, she was anorexic when she appeared in Vogue and Elle. She quit modeling in the mid-1990s when she was ordered to lose 20 pounds from her 125-pound frame. “I wanted freedom from this ideal, from these cultural ideals. I wanted freedom to be who I was,” she said during PBS's “Dying To Be Thin” broadcast in 2000. Now she is a plus-size supermodel. “Plus size is no different than skinny, it's just another way of being beautiful,” she said.
Dillon is not alone in speaking publicly about her problem. The roster of celebrities sharing their stories include actress and 1980s fitness guru Jane Fonda; Jamie-Lynn DiScala, from HBO's “Sopranos,” who contemplated suicide while suffering for years with anorexia and bulimia; and singer-dancer Paula Abdul, the “American Idol” judge who in 2005 won an award from NEDA for discussing her own struggles with eating disorders.
Eating-disorder support and research organizations often take issue with advertisements they think promote or trivialize eating disorders. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosas and Associated Disorders successfully lobbied several companies, including Chanel, Hershey Foods and Revlon, to get them to change or pull ads touting slogans like, “You can never be too rich or too thin.” And NEDA is currently targeting Spencer Gifts for its T-shirts that flippantly read, “I beat Anorexia.”
The group “About Face” takes a more sarcastic approach when criticizing the culture of thinness. In 1995, it plastered hundreds of copies of a poster around San Francisco that spoofs a Kate Moss ad for perfume with “Emaciation Stinks: Stop Starvation Imagery.” The group also has a poster with a circus theme showing caged models that says, “Please Don't Feed the Models.”
But experts are clear that the media and Hollywood, by themselves, can't prompt someone to become anorexic or bulimic. “It's almost normative now for 16-year-old girls to loathe their bodies. That's certainly a byproduct of the culture,” says Bunnell, adding, “I don't think the culture causes eating disorders, but it absolutely contributes to it.”
|
Read the Full Report (Subscription Required)
