Avocado Toast, Sushi – Drinking Food? Who will be the first Time to Isabelle’s profile on Instagram, imagines himself, perhaps, on a food blog.
The description provides clarity: “Unistudentin, give my Best to overcome my anorexia”, is there in English. Isabelle is 24 years old and has an eating disorder.
“Here, I can tell my story,” says Isabelle about your profile.
Diary and self-help group
Isabelle’s story and that of your eating disorder is a with UPS and Downs. On the Account lifeof.isi gives you daily Updates of your life between full-time study, and eating disorders. The end of 2018, Isabelle was repeatedly passed out and came to the hospital.
Their Followers took them. Many of them have an eating disorder. With you, Isabelle, tips, exchange, donate to each other compassion.
“A large uncontrollable self-help group”, is called to your Account, therefore.
Content for dealing with eating disorders to take in the social media resistant, says Silke Naab, chief of the youth Department of the Schön Klinik Roseneck.
It provides the advantages and disadvantages the platforms: Instagrammer as Isabelle served on the one hand, as a figure of identification. To see that people were fighting despite the setbacks against the disease, can be very motivating.
But Naab also warns: as soon As the eating disorder is glorified, should be Followers to take up a distance from the profile.
Glorification instead of warning
The eating disorder glorify – this is exactly what happens in Pro-Ana or Pro-Mia forums. “Since the disease is Lifestyle,” says Silja Vocks, President of the German society for eating disorders, and Professor of Clinical psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Osnabrück.
Pro-Ana is short for Pro anorexia, so anorexia, Pro-Mia stands for Pro-bulimia.
How dangerous Pro-Ana groups are, know Isabelle from my own experience. With 17 she was about such a group at a Messenger-service “in the eating disorder has slipped,” says the now 24-Year-old.
Each week, 500 grams of the goal was to lose weight. Isabelle took off and went sometime with the fear to bed, the next Morning, not waking up. Then you have admitted to yourself that it can’t go on like this.
Affected are mostly young women
According to the Federal centre for health education (BZgA) have a three-to-five percent of people in Germany an eating disorder.
Including lean fall addiction, bulimia, and Binge Eating. Here, the Affected have similar to bulimia Binges, not to throw up but then. Often the disease would occur as a mixed form.
About a fifth of the children and young people showed symptoms of an eating disorder. Men were significantly less likely than women, so the BZgA.
Isabelle knows that she is around 1200 followers on your profile no guide to healing an eating disorder: “I am myself, still, to find my final way out of the illness”.
Relapses are not excluded
Although Isabelle has been fighting for years against the disease and prolonged phases of under-weight was, and repeatedly relapses, as a year ago.
The relapse lasts until today. Instagram can give it to her then force. Here you will meet people who have a similar story and they “understand better” than people without an eating disorder, says Isabelle.
Even if the Content can be Followers helpful, especially Affected, which were still deep in the disease, discourages Naab to share your story on the net.
“It is a relatively anonymous space where you can share very personal information without knowing how others might use that information.”
Instagram may not be a parallel world
People with Anorexia nervosa, anorexia, are often socially isolated and would find in the social media, the longed for Echo, says Silja Vocks.
So the Problem was not solved but, warns Naab: “It is not enough that I share my Worries and Fears in the network, but this is the experience I need to make in real life. It is difficult when there is a parallel world.”
Connecting with others on Instagram but could be a good first step, says the Doctor.
People notice when a family member about symptoms of an eating disorder, advises Naab, to find the conversation. The subject was occupied in Affected but often shame.
Therefore, the offer to speak with another trusted person or a therapist could help, often. Parents should inform themselves of what the media use of their children. Here, too, an open conversation might help.
Isabelle has blocked almost all of your friends on Instagram, among other things, because they want you to do it as a “big Worry”. With the followers of the exchange was casual.
“I am talking not directly to a Person, how it would be in contact with a friend of mine.” The Followers who want to deal with it, do it. “And if not, then not.”
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa)
*The contribution of “Shared sorrow, half sorrow?!: So dangerous for the social networks in the case of an eating disorder are published” is of FitForFun. Contact with the executives here.