We Are Amazing

Hello readers!  Apologies for my long silence – most of my time and energy have been taken up with work and cycle training recently – but there is no excuse for not writing and I will endeavour to post a bit more regularly in the future (people tell me one of the best ways to get good blog readership is to post regularly, so I hope I still have some despite my atrocious irregularity!!).

I should take a leaf from his book and blog more often!

I’d like to clarify that the fact I haven’t published anything on here in a while doesn’t mean I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the things I write about.  I suppose I’ve had less energy to think and write about these things because work has been tough going, but right now I’m sort of feeling a new lease of life and hoping it lasts!

Recently I’ve met and had discussions with a fair few people who share my views on mental health, body image, etc.  The feeling I get is there are a lot of us, which makes it even more frustrating that things aren’t changing more quickly.  Anyway, my favourite encounter happened a few weeks ago when I discovered a new musical hero, who by fortunate coincidence was the support act at a gig I went to.  She goes by the name Philippa Hanna, and one of her songs in particular struck a chord with me (pin not intended!!).  Well, more to the point, the sentiment behind the song struck a chord (this is one thing I really like about this girl - she is a proper singer-songwriter and gave a little synopsis of each song before performing it - nice touch!). 

Philippa talked of how in the past she would do things like go on crazy diets to try and conform to the image of ‘beauty’ prescribed by the media.  Sometimes she thought that she couldn’t get a record deal because physically she wasn’t beautiful enough.  Then, she tells us, she realised it wasn’t necessary to do this, that she was beautiful the way she was, that each one of us should be happy with ourselves because “no one else can be you”.  She then wrote a lovely song called I Am Amazing, which illustrates her change of heart and encourage others to challenge negative thoughts about themselves.  I don’t feel I’ve done this justice as I remember Philippa putting it a lot more nicely and eloquently than I have!  But the point is that there are just too many people striving for unrealistic and impossible ideals of ‘beauty’ because it is drummed into is culturally that this is what we should do.  We need to break free from this viscous circle of media distortion and unhealthy behaviour. 

Let's stop striving for unrealistic ideals of physical beauty

Mental illness is on the up, particularly amongst young people, and I feel that this problem is a big contributing factor to this.  Probably my favourite lyric from the song is Not gonna listen to the voices of my enemies today.  I see the harmful ideals being imposed on people by today’s Western culture almost as an enemy that needs to be challenged, and re-shaped into a healthier form.  This is one of several big cultural changes that I strongly feel need to take place, and I’m determined to contribute to making this happen.

After I saw Philippa Hanna perform, I was fortunate enough to have a brief but interesting conversation with her and told her how pleased I was to hear her speaking the way she had about body image and the media.  She mentioned to me that there have been attempts in the past to pass a law the required all airbrushed images to be labelled as such.  Sadly such a law has not been passed.  Personally I think this would be a very positive step towards reducing the current problem whereby such a great number of young people are taking unhealthy steps towards unobtainable ideals in appearance.  Perhaps my next step will be to start a petition to make this happen… Who’s with me?!

Different But The Same?

This post is inspired by a research talk I went to a few days ago, which in basic terms was to do with the relationships between eating disorder (ED) symptoms and emotional processing difficulties.  As you might expect intuitively, there was found to be a greater incidence of emotion processing difficulties amongst ED patients than that their healthy counterparts.  There were some other interesting findings, but the thing that really got me thinking was something not covered by the researchers… 

An explanation of correlations - in case you don't know!!

Allow me to explain!  When introducing the research and talking about the methodology, the researcher mentioned that one of the things they had measured was depression symptoms (using the Beck Depression Inventory, or BDI), but that since there was so much data she wouldn’t be discussing this in her short 30 minute presentation!  Naturally this disappointed me slightly, as someone with a very keen interest in depression.  So, once the talk was over and it was time for questions from the audience, I couldn’t help but ask how the BDI data had been used.  She explained that they had looked at the correlations between this and the various forms of emotional processing difficulty, in the same way as they had correlated these with ED symptoms.  BUT… “Did you look at the correlation between depression and eating disorder symptoms?” I asked!  “No” was the answer, but I got thinking about what the outcomes might be if they did…

What I’m thinking is this: although I’m purely speculating at this point, I think it’s fairly likely that there would be correlations between depression symptoms and ED symptoms.  In fact, in the study I have been talking about, a higher number of anorexia patients suffered from depression than healthy controls.  What I would like to know is what are the relationships between specific ED symptoms (for example, weight concern and eating concern) and depression?

Could depression and eating disorder symptoms be, to an extent, 'different but the same'?

Why am I so interested to know this?  Well, given the general in-my-opinion-too-high levels of weight and eating concern in Western society today, and the also-too-high depression rates, I feel this type of information could be very useful in combatting and preventing these types of problems.  

If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll already know that I have strong feelings about some of the things that should be happening to combat problems with body image and mental health.  If what I’ve suggested about the links between the two is true, this brings a whole new level of importance to combatting these problems!  (I realise I have made a swift shift from eating disorder symptoms to body image in the general population, but I think it’s fair to say that many people who wouldn’t necessarily be classed as having an eating disorder do experience high levels of weight and/or eating concern). 

If my claim that depression and ED symptoms are correlated is substantiated, this would mean we should be working towards interventions that aim to tackle both issues simultaneously; and given the high incidence of both, this could be extremely beneficial!  How we do this is a different question altogether, but as I’ve eluded to in previous posts, I think that schools and the media have very significant roles to play.  

Food for thought!

I realise this is all a bit woolly as it’s based on my own speculations to an extent – I do plan to try and find some relevant research literature and will be sure to do a more evidence-based post when I do! – But in the meantime, I hope you’ll agree, it certainly gives us some (excuse the pun) food for thought! 




 
Links:

Information about the Beck Depression Inventory:

http://www.apa.org/pi/about/publications/caregivers/practice-settings/assessment/tools/beck-depression.aspx