A documentary released last week shares an influencer’s battle with bulimia, as she teams up with experts to reveal eating disorders in Australian adolescents may be in epidemic proportions.
Stephanie Bailey (stephaniemaii_x), a Canberra-based beauty guru with a combined 160,000 followers, takes strides to puncture the perfect, bronzed skin of influencer culture, and reveal its correlation with a severe increase in eating disorders in recent years.
The documentary, titled Dear Social Media, is just over 22 minutes long, and can be watched on YouTube.
Stephanie delves into the role social media played in the development of her condition, which she says was as mental as it was physical. The documentary reveals a survey she conducted through her fanbase, which saw 50% of respondents believing they suffer from an eating disorder, while only 10% were diagnosed.
Even more troubling, 90% believed influencer culture was at least partially to blame for their low body image.
Stephanie consults Dr Deborah Mitchison, clinical psychologist and NHMRC Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, who says she found similar statistics in her own research. Out of 5,000 Australian adolescents surveyed, one in five had some form of eating disorder.
In Dear Social Media, Stephanie leaves no secrets in describing her journey to recovery, from believing her condition was not serious enough to get help, to becoming addicted to editing her image, to the shock of how financially inaccessible eating disorder treatment can be.
She shares her hope for the future, and explores how influencer culture may be changing, as those most affected by unrealistic body standards circulated by the internet gain their own voices and platforms.
The recollection of her titular relationship with social media, being both saved and broken by it, is an incredibly honest response to a cultural shift against “perfect” bodies online.
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