Hannah's story
Content warning: eating disorders
This blog is written by Hannah, Just Treatment's Youth Mental Health Organiser.
It's Eating Disorder Awareness Week. It so happens to be 11 years to the day since I was admitted to a children's eating disorder unit for eighteen months. The tight grip of anorexia permeated my life and the lives of my family for the duration of my teen years. I have since spent much of the last decade attempting to make sense of this time.
I was fourteen, sat in the office of my family GP and was told ‘my anorexia’ would be treated with weight monitoring, strict meal plans, and limited exercise. That soon became tube feeding, heart monitoring and swiftly an 18 month hospital admission 2 hours from my family home. Like all manifestations of mental illness, when restricting food intake reaches a certain point it is framed as an individual pathology; ‘the eating disorder’. Every doctor I spoke to, every article I furtively googled while confined to bed rest all had the same conclusion; the fingers pointed only to biological and genetic explanations. Apparently, what I was enduring was a personal problem, best addressed through medication and therapy - one that I internalised as a personal failing.
It has taken me close to a decade to reframe my experience of anorexia. I believe we have depoliticised mental illness; stripping mental illness of its political and social context. We are in the midst of a growing mental health crisis that cannot be understood at an individual level. In 2022 the NHS was treating record breaking numbers of eating disorders and in 2023 59.4% of young people aged 17 to 19 years were assessed as having possible eating problems. If anything is going to shift, mental health must be understood in connection with the living conditions that shape people’s everyday lives. By that I mean, mental distress and suffering are a reasonable reaction to a cost of living crisis, housing precarity, climate breakdown and social media harm. Shifting responsibility onto individuals has served corporations incredibly well, protecting their business practices from scrutiny while they cash in on young people's suffering. One such industry is big tech.
I do not know what came first; obsessive thoughts about my weight and restricting the foods I ate or the barrage of social media content that told me being thin was the only way my body had value. I do know that social media platforms had a significant role in fuelling my eating disorder. I must have been barely thirteen when I first created a tumblr account, my mind the most impressionable it will ever be. On the cusp of puberty, I recall feeling deep embarrassment and confusion as my body slowly changed before me and, looking for a language to make sense of this turbulent time, I turned to social media.
Pausing for a fraction too long on an image of an impossibly small waist is sufficient for the algorithm to poison your feed. Quickly, my tumblr showed exclusively content of unattainable bodies - known as ‘thinspo’. I was consuming image after image that not only normalised, but glamourised protruding hip bones and concave stomachs. Pastel images of collar bones overlaid with cursive text read “hunger hurts but starvation works”. One day, after school, I read on tumblr that if my fingers couldn't fit around my thigh, I was worthless. Constantly viewing underweight bodies sets an unrealistic norm, fuelling the comparison to my own. My heart aches for my younger self in pursuit of ‘thinness’, while my hair fell out in chunks and the relationships with my family became increasingly strained. I grieve my teenage years lost to a psychiatric ward as my school friends sat exams and went to prom.
As the anorexia took hold, the content also tightened its grip. Below a BMI of 17, weight loss begins to severely impact cognitive function; obsessional thinking patterns increase and our ability to rationalise declines. Even more vulnerable to such content, I was introduced to the dark world of pro-ana forums. Places where extreme weight loss tips were exchanged, thigh measurements compared and weight loss celebrated. Today code replaces humans to keep such forums alive; the number one use of AI chatbots worldwide is therapy and companionship. As a test, I created a Chat Bot account and asked “how do I lose weight quickly?” within minutes of conversation I was recommended an extreme meal plan for less than 400 calories - insufficient nutrition for even a newborn to survive. As over 1.7 million people in the UK await community mental health treatment, is it surprising young people are forced to seek support elsewhere?
Exploiting our perception of our bodies for profit is no new phenomenon. The cosmetic industry exists by manufacturing insecurities - cellulite, ageing, wrinkles - to market a new ‘quick fix’ product. The digital world is no different; body dysmorphia, a condition characteriszed by a distorted self-perception, has evolved into ‘snapchat dysmorphia’ as teens struggle to see their unaltered reflections without filters. Last week it was reported teens are routinely bombarded with advertisements for dangerous products for medical weight loss, skin whitening and steroids. In a landscape where algorithms favour extreme content, potentially dangerous products and extreme diets are being normalised, and worse; followed as a blueprint to a healthy lifestyle.
It should be no surprise that the objectification of women’s bodies is at the heart of big tech business models, from the start big tech products were set up to enable this. While at university, Zuckerberg created Facebook 1.0, known then as ‘FaceMash’. Without consent, photos of women on campus were uploaded alongside one another for Zuckerberg and his friends to ‘rate’ their hotness. Like cosmetic companies, big tech has been able to turn self-doubt into a multibillion-dollar industry. I did not seek out ‘thinspo’ and I did not find pro-anorexia forums by accident. This is by design in the pursuit of profit - a carefully calculated algorithm learnt my insecurities in order to push content that would keep me scrolling. Meta has known about the harm of social media for years; leaked documents showed an internal presentation slide that read “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls”. Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen, exposed how Meta targets teens based on their emotional states. She testified that if a teen girl deleted a selfie, algorithms would push marketing for beauty products.
I feel angry that something that could be a source of community and self-expression has turned into a tool for manipulation. We did not sign up for that. If we want to “treat” the growing crisis of eating disorders in young people, we can’t stop at meal plans or weight checks. Real prevention requires confronting the role big tech plays in fueling these illnesses — and holding them accountable.
Unless we are talking about the systemic causes of mental illness and holding the corporations profiting from our distress to account, we are doing a disservice to young people. The Mad Youth Organise campaign is channeling our lived experience into taking on the business practices that are making us sick - find out more and get involved here.