Eating disorders: The blame game

The patient will blame his/herself. The parents will blame themselves. The tabloids blame the fashion industry. The fashion industry blames nobody (ignorance is bliss). The partners (those that last) don’t know who to blame. The public blame modern culture, celebrities; whatever or whoever they’re told to blame by the media. The media, strangely, tends to blame the media.

A mess. What is clear though, is that we just love to point the finger at someone or something. We have this overwhelming urge to hold something up and say ‘You’re a disgrace, look what you’ve done!’ We do this, too often, without really thinking it through. As soon as we make a connection that sounds feasible, there’s our explanation: job done. Once we make this observation and everything clicks into place, we’re satisfied with ourselves and stop looking beyond what we have. We can then direct all our anger, frustrations and bitterness at whatever this thing is in the hope that venting and ranting like madmen will solve everything – or at least make us feel a bit better. It won’t last.

It’s in our nature to want answers, especially where illness is concerned. We want to know what is wrong, what will happen, how it will affect us, how long for, what the treatment is – but most of all, why?

Why does a person develop an eating disorder? How long have you got?

Forgive me for going off on a tangent here, it’s a relevant one, I promise. In Michael Moore’s documentary ‘Bowling For Columbine’, news reports of the tragic shootings were shown to be desperately looking for someone or something to blame in the immediate aftermath. Violent video games and television were suggested to be a possible explanation for the extreme actions of the two teenagers, but the name that kept coming up, over and over, was Marilyn Manson. Michael Moore goes to meet Marilyn Manson backstage at a concert and asks him “If you could talk to the kid in that community what would you say to them right now?” Manson answers, without a thought, “I wouldn’t say a single word to them, I would listen to what they have to say – and that’s what no one did.”

That is a figure who knows that people blame him and who understands why. It gives people comfort to have that concrete idea in their head: this happened because of this, because x = y. It’s neat, tidy, simple. It makes it easier to deal with a problem if you can at least settle on how it came about. What I admire about Manson’s response is that he doesn’t feel the need to lecture or defend himself or even attempt to suggest people look elsewhere to place the blame. His own response was far more intelligent, and even if you do think he’s a devil worshipping nutcase, you can’t knock him for that.

He, and everything his music represents, was the scapegoat. In such situations, people desperately search for and cling to the most obvious reasoning for why such an awful thing should happen to them. This is exactly what the media does, and continues to do when it comes to reporting on eating disorders. What is different here, is that they should know better by now.

Last year, Beat published a set of guidelines for the press on how to report on stories and case studies about eating disorders. One of the main points stipulated in these guidelines is that publishing images of severely emaciated bodies and explicit details such as exact calorie intake and lowest weights can have a massively negative impact on readers. Many people with eating disorders, regardless of what stage of recovery they are at, find these images and information triggering – so rather than spreading awareness of such illnesses, they are actually making the situation worse. Not only that, but they also perpetuate the myth that a person with an eating disorder must look a certain way (skeletal), eat a certain amount (next to nothing) and weigh the equivalent of a small child. None of this is true. 80% of people with an eating disorder are in the normal weight range or above. The messages that ‘real life’ magazine and tabloid features send out are not only false, but ill-informed and potentially dangerous.

When I look at certain ‘news’ sites, I get lost in where the blame begins and ends. When they report on anorexia, they use ‘real life’ pictures of sad teenage girls with undies hanging off their rake hips like rags off a windswept scarecrow. They might make the effort to include an inch of the column on recovery, all very light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel-esque. Glance to the right though, and almost every single story will be chastising a singer for being too skinny, a TOWIE girl for piling on the pounds and congratulating an X-Factor contestant on losing her chub. Then there are the diet adverts. Whilst I hate to even think about blaming the media for eating disorders, this pile of utter rubbish does not help in the slightest.

Closer to home we have the parents. Now, I can’t speak for all of them but the vast majority I have met or who have contacted me have more or less insisted that the fact that their child has developed an eating disorder is all their fault. They must have done something wrong, missed a trick, should have caught it sooner, should have said something, should have dragged their child kicking and screaming to the doctors, should have insisted the doctor took them seriously when they were batted away. Whatever it was, there was something, somewhere that they missed, and now they’re wondering what happened to their son or daughter.

I can’t imagine how that feels. The closest I’ve been is seeing that look in their eyes. The disbelief, the ‘please God, don’t let this be real’. I’ve seen the upset, the tears, the frustration and I’ve had the questions. I have had to tell them to please shut up and stop blaming themselves – not because I was angry, not because I knew for a fact that it wasn’t true (it wasn’t), not because I thought they were being selfish by being oh so dramatic and woe is me about everything they could possibly have (but never did) do wrong – but because whether they were right or wrong, the blame game did not and never will help anything. The hurt doesn’t go away simply because someone has an answer.

Believe any theory, hypothesis or far out myth you want about why people have eating disorders. I could go on all day about their complexities, chew your ear off rattling through my own list of inklings of reasons and bore you to death repeatedly insisting that catwalk models are not to blame, but I’ve done quite enough of that already.

I interviewed a recovering anorexic recently and she said this: “I have never even come close to understanding it myself, so how the hell can anyone else?”

This just about sums it up for me. People need to search for answers and feel better when they draw their own conclusions. But blame gets us nowhere, especially when it is misplaced. Blame does not solve the problem. Blame diverts attention from what really matters.

When we stop the noisy, messy pursuit that is the blame game, we can sit back, listen and learn.

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