NJCOLUMNISTS / BUBBLE BABIES
Tell-all stars are no help; Sunday, June 11, 2006
By CATHARINE HOLAHAN
Angelina Jolie used to slice her skin with knives. Lindsay Lohan, Mary-Kate Olsen and Victoria Beckham had eating disorders, yet today, their petite frames regularly make Sexy 100 lists. With such role models, a recent report that 17% of the overall Princeton and Cornell student bodies have deliberately cut themselves shouldn't surprise anyone. Hurting yourself has become fashionable.
Maybe it's because the drug problems, the eating disorders and the self-injury all somehow make the beautiful people more beautiful, more alluring, more real. We glorify the famous who flirt with rock bottom only to inevitably rise again to the top.I am not dismissing the college students who admitted to cutting to be trend followers. Healthy, happy twenty-somethings do not repeatedly drag knives along their arms because they read that an Oscar winner did it.
Celebrities coming forward "may give them more permission in that regard, but you would still have to wonder at all the preconditions that lead someone to be troubled enough [to cut themselves]," said Dr. Daniel Silverman, a co-author of the study and Princeton University's executive director of health services. "They must be already very distressed." Depression is a growing problem among young people, particularly college students. Nearly half of all college students are depressed and 15% meet the criteria for clinical depression, according to the latest mental health reports.But our cultural attitude toward self-injury is only worsening youth depression by unintentionally treating cutting, drug abuse and starvation as common, almost legitimate expression. Celebrity admissions can fool young people into believing that self-harm is not bad.
Citing celebrity poster children for such behaviors, it would be reasonable to assume self-abusive actions are relatively safe coping mechanisms for suffering. After all, Jolie is not disfigured. Lohan's teeth never rotted.And the celebrities don't have arms like Vicki Duffy's.
Duffy, a 37-year-old Parsippany resident, battled eating disorders and cutting for decades. At age 8, she began slicing into her arms with rocks. By her 20s, she was burning herself with cigarettes.
Eventually, her burned arms became painfully infected and she had to have a skin graft. Her scars are the stuff of medical journals, not Maxim magazine. Today, Duffy shows off her scars in an effort to educate people about the ugly consequences of self-harm. She encourages them to seek help. "When you have Princess Diana and Johnny Depp coming out about their problems, it's not the same as people taking chunks of skin from their bodies and throwing it in the garbage like it was paper", Duffy said.
When people are alone and desperate, it can be attractive to express their feelings in the same destructive way as others to feel part of a community.How else can pro-anorexia Web sites be explained?On a recent visit to a Web forum, one visitor wrote: "Hey beautifuls! Today wasn't too bad, breakfast like 1/4 a cup of cereal and then I came home and had some onion soup so overall about 400 calories, I think I'm going to throw up the soup though, I feel way too full."
Mary-Kate Olsen's picture was posted throughout the Web forum. The fact that she reportedly was hospitalized for her eating disorder didn't sway the girls. Instead, they worshipped her thinness.What did have a sobering effect was the story of a girl who lost a tooth because of constant purging. Some girls said they would rethink their starvation diets.
Others were annoyed: "Anorexia is a lifestyle some choose and others don't," wrote one girl. "It is obviously not for you, and that is fine, but leave your opinion to yourself because it is not valued here. Oh and by the way, you do lose weight starving yourself. I am down below 95 pounds and loving it."
For those who would dismiss this girl as deeply disturbed, there are many starlets who weigh about the same. With such images on television and in the gossip magazines, how can people develop a proper understanding of the damage that self-destructive behaviors can cause?To encourage people to seek help, we have to foster a culture that regards self-destructive behavior as treatable and understandable, but also terribly dangerous and sad. We have to show people the non-glamorous truth by showing the skin-graft scars of cutters and the smiles of bulimics missing teeth.We have to show the ugly consequences.
Bubble Babies is a biweekly lifestyles column focused on twenty and thirty-somethings.
