Weighing eating disorders and social media

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Mark Cuban referred to it as "headline porn," such as the ones that have steadily streamed into my Facebook Timeline:

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So when I saw the headline Social media helps fuel some eating disorders on Google News, I bristled.  But I read the article, and it's actually reasonable:

Barbara Smolek, administrative manager at the Columbia and Weill Cornell Center for Eating Disorders, said the center has seen an increase in positive dialogue being shared on social media. 

"Messages of hope and recovery, which are so important to share, are increasingly easy to find," Smolek said. 

Clinicians caution, though, that social media users need to be careful about the online recovery communities from which they seek advice and to be selective about which they follow. 

"You have to be a smart consumer," said [head of Rockland Jewish Family Services, Christine Miraglia] Knorr. "It's very tough out there to find stuff that is not triggering, that's supportive and not harmful."

I worked closely and actively in the eating disorders program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, well before and throughout graduate school.  All the major research and review I did were on this subject, and admittedly I felt a certain affinity with these young women afflicted with milder to very severe forms of anorexia, bulimia, and bulimarexia, in both outpatient and inpatient settings.

Anyway this is a topic for another article, but suffice it to say that what Marcela Rojas writes in the article makes very good sense.  There is exquisite comparisons and vicious competition among such afflicted women, that the very visual and social nature of Facebook and Instagram are truly a perfect (i.e., destructive) platform for eating disorders.

The lesson here for business, brand or organizational owners vis-a-vis a social media is indeed to be careful.  But the tacit, no less important lesson, too, is to avoid resorting to hyperboles (i.e., headline porn) and jumping to conclusions about the good or the bad that social media does.  So when I see the key words "helps fuel" and "some eating disorders," Rojas is being responsible in her journalism.