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Topic: Eating Disorders/Body Image Issues

Slide 1:
Body image can be defined as a person’s thoughts, behavior, and feelings towards
their physical appearance. Cultural, societal, and psychological factors influence one’s
body image and can lead to the development of distorted perceptions of shape and
appearance. Such perceptions are highly likely to contribute to depression, anxiety,
less confidence, and self-doubt. Societal expectations of thinness and high restrictions
on calorie intake and physical exercise can increase dissatisfaction with one’s body.

Slide 2:
An individual with body image issues is more likely to be diagnosed with eating
disorders. Eating disorders are characterized by an abnormal pattern of eating and
exercising that significantly affects an individual's everyday life. It is followed by
pathological disturbances of behavior and attitudes that include anorexia nervosa,
bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. Such disorders can be contributing factors
and can also exist independently of body image issues.

Slide 3:
Body image issues also share a common pattern with body dysmorphic disorders. The
difference between the two is that BDD has been concerned with preoccupations
related to imagined defects in one’s appearance, while body image concerns deal with
abnormal perceptions and actions related to one’s weight and shape.

Slide 4:
Body image issues and eating disorders can have an adverse impact on an individual's
physical and psychological wellbeing, and taking professional help from friends,
family, and other recognized mental health providers can provide support and
guidance to those affected by such challenges. Proper diagnosis, treatment planning,
and emphasis on embracing one’s body in a positive manner can lessen the likelihood
of eating disorders in individuals with body image issues.

Note-making on anxiety disorders

Anxiety can be defined as one’s physiological and emotional response to a vague

sense of threat or danger that involves unpleasant feelings of fear and apprehension. It
also includes symptoms such as rapid heart rate, shortness of breath, dizziness,
sweating, diarrhea, and tremors.

Fear is the central nervous system's physiological and emotional response to a serious
threat to one’s well-being.

Anxiety disorders are those that interfere with a personal normal activity caused by
anxiety, which occurs at inappropriate times, occurs infrequently, and is so intense
and long-lasting.

Types of anxiety disorders:

 Generalized Anxiety Disorder
 It is marked by persistent and excessive feelings of anxiety and worry about
numerous events and activities.
 Also known as Free Floating Anxiety
 The symptoms last for about 6 months and include feelings of restlessness,
being keyed up, being easily tired, difficulty maintaining concentration, muscle
tension, and suffering from sleep disturbances.
 Causes of GAD:
 Societal and Multicultural factors: People who lives in highly threating
environments, suffers from poverty, lack of financial support, low level of
education and poor health care can contribute to developing GAD in such
situations.
 Psychodynamic Perspective: Use of ego defense mechanisms, inadequacies in
the early relationship between parents and children, extreme protectiveness by
the parents, and punishment for the id impulses lead to a higher level of anxiety
in the children.
 Humanistic Perspective: Children who fail to receive unconditional positive
regard from others and try to fulfill the conditions of worth by repeatedly
distorting and denying their true thoughts and feelings become extremely
anxious, which leads to the development of some kind of psychological
dysfunction.
 Cognitive Perspective: Development of maladaptive assumptions about dealing
with stressful situations and interpreting them as dangerous, to overact and feel
fear. Meta-cognitive theory by Adrian Wells focuses on positive and
negative beliefs about worrying that lead to appraising and coping with threats
in some situations, and repeated worrying can be harmful and uncontrollable in
other cases. The avoidance theory by Thomas Borkovec attributed the causes
of this disorder to the greater bodily arousal in some individuals than others,
and worrying serves to reduce this unpleasant physical feeling.
 Biological Perspective: About 15% of the biological relatives of people with
GAD are likely to develop this disorder. The improper functioning of
prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala that helps to
regulate emotional reactions can lead to development of GAD in the
individuals.
 Treatments:
 Psychodynamic therapies
 Client-centered therapy
 Cognitive therapies
 Drug therapy
 Relaxation training and biofeedback

 Phobias
 It is characterized by the persistent and unreasonable fear of a particular object,
activity, or situation that causes significant distress and a strong desire to avoid
the object or situation in the lives of affected persons.
 Types of phobias: specific phobias that involve intense and persistent exposure
to a particular object or situation, usually lasting for about 6 months, and
produce immediate fear upon exposure to the object. People who are diagnosed
with agoraphobia are afraid of being in public places or situations where
escape might be difficult or help is unavailable, experience panic, or become
incapacitated in the event of developing disabling symptoms. Individuals with
agoraphobia also sometimes experience extreme and sudden explosions of fear,
called panic attacks.
 Causes of phobias:
 Behavioral Explanations: Classical conditioning is a common way to acquire
phobic responses by repeatedly pairing two events together at the same time
that become strongly associated in the person’s mind. Modeling also helps to
explain the development of phobias through observation and imitation of other
actions. Stimulus generalization, which involves response to one stimulus
produced by another stimulus and preparedness to develop certain fears, can
lead to the occurrence of phobias in some individuals.
 Treatments:
 Systematic desensitization
 Flooding
 Modeling

 Social Anxiety Disorder

 It is defined as the severe, persistent, and irrational fear about social or
performance situations in which they may face scrutiny by others and possibly
feel embarrassment.
 It ranges from narrow situations, which include a fear of talking or eating in
front of others, to broad ones that involve a general fear of poorly functioning
in front of others.
 Causes of SAD:
 Cognitive Factors: Such theories believe that individuals with this disorder hold
unrealistic social standards of performing perfectly in social situations and
view themselves as unattractive, socially unskilled, and inadequate. They
believe that they lose control over feelings of anxiety and behave
 incompetently in social situations. Such individuals adopt safety and avoidance
behaviors to help prevent and reduce the intensity of the social disasters that
they anticipate occurring. Other factors, such as genetic predisposition, trait
tendencies, biological abnormalities, traumatic childhood experiences, and
overprotective parent-child interactions, can increase the tendency to develop
this disorder in adulthood.
 Treatments:
 Antidepressant medication
 Exposure therapy
 Cognitive therapies
 Social skills training
 Assertiveness training

 Panic disorder
 Individuals who are suffering from panic disorder are more likely to experience
periodic, short bouts of panic that occur suddenly, reach a peak within minutes,
and gradually pass, causing dysfunctional changes in their behavior and
thinking.
 The diagnosis of this disorder includes at least one month of persistent worry
about having additional attacks and feelings of losing control, going crazy, and
dying.
 Such attacks are followed by physiological symptoms such as palpitations of
the heart, shortness of breath, tingling, chest pains, faintness, and a feeling of
unreality.
 Causes of panic disorder:
 Biological perspective: An increase in the activity of the norepinephrine
neurotransmitter in the locus coeruleus is strongly associated with the
development of this disorder. Brain circuits that include the amygdala,
hippocampus, ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, central gray matter,
and locus coeruleus can lead to panic reactions in certain individuals. Close
relatives and identical twins have higher rates of developing panic disorder
than distant relatives and fraternal twins.
 Cognitive perspective: Such theorists believe that the panic reaction is
experienced by those individuals who are more sensitive to certain bodily
sensations and misinterpret them as signs of a medical catastrophe. These
individuals also have a higher degree of anxiety sensitivity, which makes them
focus on bodily sensations much of the time and reduces their ability to assess
them logically and interpret them as potentially harmful.
 Treatments:
 Antidepressant drugs
 Cognitive therapy

 Obsessive-compulsive disorder
 A disorder in which the person has persistent thoughts, ideas, or impulses that
seem to invade their consciousness (obsessions) and a need to perform
 repetitive and rigid behaviors or mental acts to prevent and reduce anxiety
(compulsions).
 The symptoms of this disorder include obsessions and compulsions that
become excessive or unreasonable, cause great distress, take up much time,
and interfere with daily functions.
 A person is usually aware that their thoughts are excessive, and an attempt to
ignore or resist these thoughts may arouse even more anxiety. Such thoughts
are often intrusive and foreign to the person experiencing them.
 Compulsive behaviors are typically under the voluntary control of the affected
person, who recognizes them as unreasonable and feels terrible for being
unable to perform such behaviors. They often develop into detailed rituals.
 A person with this disorder is also likely to develop hoarding disorder, hair-
pulling disorder, skin-picking disorder, and body dysmorphic disorder.
 Causes of OCD:
 Psychodynamic perspective: The disorder occurs due to the battle between id
impulses, which usually take the form of obsessive thoughts, and the ego
defenses, which appear as counter thoughts or compulsive actions. Three
common defense mechanisms in OCD are isolation, which involves simply
refusing to take responsibility for their unwanted thoughts and experiencing
them as foreign intrusions; undoing, which leads to performing actions to
prevent undesirable impulses; and reaction formation, in which a person
adopts a lifestyle that directly opposes their unacceptable id impulses. Other
psychodynamic theorists attribute this disorder to the fixation at the anal stage
of development, during which the children experience rage and shame as a
result of negative toilet training practices.
 Behavioral perspective: the use of reinforcement acts to maintain compulsive
behaviors in order to prevent bad outcomes and ensure positive outcomes.
 Cognitive perspective: Persons who are diagnosed with this disorder are likely
to blame themselves for having repetitive, unwanted, and intrusive thoughts
and believe that terrible things will happen. They try to neutralize the thoughts
by behaving or thinking in ways to avoid negative consequences, making
amends, requesting special reassurance from others, deliberately thinking good
thoughts, and checking for possible sources of danger. Such neutralizing effects
lead to a temporary reduction in discomfort and are more likely to be repeated
as the result of reinforcement.
 Biological perspective: family pedigree studies suggest that identical twins are
more likely to develop this disorder than fraternal twins. Serotonin, glutamate,
GABA, and dopamine are likely to be involved in the development of this
disorder. Abnormal functioning of the specific regions of the brain that include
the orbitofrontal cortex and caudate nucleus that convert sensory information
into thoughts and actions has been linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The cingulate gyrus and amygdala may also play a role in this disorder.
 Treatments:
 Short-term psychodynamic therapy
 Exposure and response prevention
 Cognitive-behavioral treatments
 Antidepressant drugs