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Surfing a Thin Line
Anorexia and the Internet
By Kelly Burgess
In the early days of the Internet, these sites became very popular very quickly, but by 2001 they were also becoming increasingly visible. That's the year that pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia Web sites were featured both in Time Magazine and on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Soon after, Yahoo and many other site hosts large and small shut down existing pro-ana/mia sites and banned new sites.
Nowadays, they're harder to find, but they do still exist. Most of them feature tips for very low calorie eating, tricks for hiding weight loss and avoiding detection and treatment, and "thinspiration" in the form of photos of very thin women – almost all of whom are well-known celebrities such as Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan and Calista Flockhart.
The dangers of these sites, says Dr. Alison Friedman, a licensed psychologist and supervisor of clinical training at the Renfrew Center, a nonprofit organization for education, prevention, research and treatment of eating disorders, is that not only can they push someone over the brink who may be on the verge of developing an eating disorder, but they can also undermine ongoing treatment.
"What I see is that they pooh-pooh those girls whose families and friends are trying to get them help," says Dr. Friedman. "There's really an us versus them mentality, and this is particularly difficult with eating disorders because the person suffering from them is already generally very resistant to treatment.