The internet has aggravated the issue of Eating Disorders a lot, together with advertising and fashion. It's just SO easy for them to find other people that think and live the same way, it actually becomes 'normal'. It scares me to see how many of you know someone who has gone through an eating disorder, and I am no exception. I can at least think of three people that have been through this.
I feel like in the past 5-10 years Anorexia (and Bulimia, to some extent) has been glamorized. Ana and Mia are beautiful, a sign of willpower, sexy. They are cool. Unlike any other mental illnesses, Ana is a cool disorder. Girls strive to become anorectic, they ask for advice on how to do it, they search for information, they tell each other their daily routines on blogs and have their commandments, songs, rules, games, races. It's like a religion. It's unbelievable. I can't imagine this happening with psychosis or schizophrenia.
And it's sort of understandable. While, fortunately, most girls don't have the self-destructive personality that truly leads them to the real illness (in the end, Ana is not about being thin, it's about not being at all, disappearing, being undeserving of nutrition, blaming yourself and punishing yourself with pain, etc), many of them give it a try and go through drastic diets. And who can blame them when everyone (commercials, retail stores, top-models, magazines) is telling you that you need to lose weight.
Jeasy.
