Are actors and other performers at greater risk for body image problems and eating disorders than people who are not ‘in the spotlight’? Maybe.
What has interested me in this topic over the years is how many very talented women – especially actors – have spoken about body issues and eating disorders now or in their teens, and about the pressure in the entertainment industry to look “right.” – and how that pressure relates to self-esteem and the dark side of striving for perfection.
What interested me again in all of this was that of psychotherapist Isabella Mori [@moritherapy] after eating disorders, depression and perfectionism. She notices that Therese Borchard [in her book Beyond Blue] quotes from Cherry Boone O’Neill’s memoir, Hungry for attention :
“In my early years, I equated my worth as a person with the level of my performance and felt that other people’s love and approval would depend on my perfection.
“Therefore, I did everything I could to be the best I could be in some area of my endeavors, but I repeatedly fell short of my goals and risked losing value in the eyes of others. Trying even harder, but missing the mark again and again, resulted in even more feelings of guilt and self-loathing.”
The image above is an actor and entrepreneur Mary Kate Olsen – hospitalized a few years ago for anorexia.
Most of the references in this post are to women; a site of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at Anorexia says that 85 – 95 percent of anorexia patients are women.
Character traits
The psychologist Dr. Jenn Berman of Beverly Hills notes, “Psychological experts have discovered that many of the personality traits that make children great athletes or performers are the very same traits that make them more susceptible to eating disorders; the most common is: perfectionism; the desire to please; the ability to ignore pain and exhaustion; obsessiveness and the burning desire to achieve their goals.”
From her article Child Performers and Eating Disorders: Why It Happens and What You Can Do About It.
Entertainment Tonight reported in 2006 that the 17-year-old was a “Reba” actress Scarlett Pomers had gone to an eating disorder clinic to deal with her extreme weight loss… it reached an astonishing low of 33 pounds…
“My weight was something I could control. I started dieting excessively and exercising too much [as much as six hours per day].”
A glorified disorder
“Eating disorders are glorified in a way that other mental health conditions are not,” says Traci Mann, PhD, who studied the effectiveness of an eating disorder prevention program. “People don’t say: I wish I could be schizophrenic for three months. I want to be anorexic for three months, it may sound so ridiculous, but it is not.”
The image that many have of eating disorders, says Mann, is very distorted: that they are behaviors that are slightly outside the norm, that make you thin and from which you can recover at will. [cnn.com May 18, 1998]
Caryl Ehrlich, in her article Unrealistic Expectations Can Cause Failure – adapted from her book Overcome your food addiction – tells about a young woman:
“She couldn’t acknowledge anything positive. Her unrealistic expectations were so great that it was impossible for her to feel joy or satisfaction in what she had achieved. Ignoring these fragile buds, not watering them, caring for them or leaving them out of sunlight turns them into dust.”
Felicity Huffman [“Desperate Housewives” and a number of movies] revealed that she suffered from eating disorders during her late teens.
She says, “I had bulimia and anorexia for a while, and I just hated my body. As an actress I was never thin enough, never beautiful enough. My breasts weren’t big enough.” Huffman says he has two children and turned 40 because he helped her finally come to terms with her body.
She adds, “I think I’ve always had a 40-year-old body, and now that I’m actually there, I’m like, ‘Hey, pretty good.'” [imdb.com 23 Nov 2005]
Actor Kate Beckinsale has reported that she also suffered as a teenager. “I was anorexic and weighed five stone [seventy pounds] at fifteen. I always felt that anorexia was the form of breakdown most readily available to adolescent girls.
“Its place and role in the family is very interesting: there is usually one person in the family who unknowingly becomes the catalyst for things – almost the scapegoat in a sense – to prevent the whole structure from collapsing.
“I had five years of intensive Freudian analysis, something I don’t think many girls my age do.
“My family didn’t react to my anorexia as a physical illness, which was terribly important. Anorexia is a distraction… everything that happens underneath continues.” [Interview mag. July, 1998]
Gifted women
Psychologist Patricia Gatto-Walden, PhD describes a number of contributing issues:
“Working with gifted women with eating disorders, I have noticed many of these characteristics: confusion regarding giftedness; imposter syndrome; feeling too different from others; asynchronous development; think differently; intense sensitivity and empathy; existential depression…
“All my gifted female clients with an eating disorder had six characteristics in common, namely:
> personal identity that does not include giftedness
> debilitating perfectionism
> excessive need to please others
> experience of isolation and loneliness
> stressful transitions during the onset of the disorder”
From her article “Counselling gifted women with eating disorders” – Advanced Development: A Journal of Adult Giftedness, Vol. 8, 1999.
Scarlett Johansson finds a very skinny look ‘unsexy’. That’s also the case for many of us men who appreciate feminine beauty – and she is a wonderful example, along with other women mentioned here.
She says: ‘I try to stay fit and eat healthy, but I’m not afraid of starving myself and becoming unnaturally thin. I don’t find that look attractive on women and I don’t want to be part of that trend. It’s unhealthy and it puts too much pressure on women in general, who are presented with this image of the ideal, which is not the case.
“I think America has become obsessed with diets. I also don’t think being ultra-thin is sexy at all. Women should not be forced to conform to unrealistic and unhealthy body images that the media promotes. I don’t have to be skinny to be sexy.”
From my post about Women and Talent: Scarlett Johansson on negative body image: “I don’t have to be skinny to be sexy.”
Actor, producer, director Drew Barrymore has put forward a similar perspective that seems positive and realistic to me:
“It is my responsibility to keep myself at a certain level of fitness and health. But my body type is my body type, and I’m not going to starve myself. And you can’t win…. No one has it all. We all have our qualities, and you should be grateful for that.” [Premiere, Nov. 2000]
That kind of healthy self-esteem may not be something you can easily “choose.”
Anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphia are serious disorders and can have complex psychological origins and multiple mental health aspects.
An eating disorder can be life-threatening; it may have been a factor in Brittany Murphy’s recent death.
But if you are a girl or woman, even without a clinical disorder, but have the experience of worrying too much about the appearance of an airbrushed model or actress on the cover of a magazine, or of many TV and movie stars, then it might be worth asking to what extent that worry (and perhaps excessive exercise and dieting) is diverting your energy from other, perhaps more satisfying forms of creative self-expression. I’m just asking. But what do I know? I am not of the feminine persuasion.
Related:
Perfectionist posts on the High Ability site
Perfectionist articles
Articles about self-concept / self-esteem
Body image quotes, books etc
Quotes about eating disorders, books etc
my article The dark side of beauty
Books about eating disorders
Perfectionist books
perfectionism and eating disorders, perfectionism and mental health, perfectionism and self-image, obsession with body image
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Douglas Eby (MA/Psychology) is author of the Creative Mind series of sites which “Provide information and inspiration to promote creativity and personal development.”
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