I’m doing psychopathology this semester and one of the criteria for the course is to have a group presentation. My group, consisting of 4 people decided to do on anorexia (AN). Now, this is a topic so familiar to us all right?

Let me share yet another story. I never understand how people can be anorexic. Seriously, the food in Singapore is too good!!! Adding on, there are wonderful foods in the world yet to be explored and tasted. With that sentence, ha, I think it can pretty much explain my size now hur. Haha.

Back to the topic- I can’t revel too much on the group’s presentation. It will only spoil the fun. So, you just got to wait for the day of psychopathology presentation. In a nutshell, we have a case study, and in this case, the patient went into anorexia due to pressure. This pressure is mainly internal pressure- voices in her head telling her that she is fat even when she is already super skinny.

More and more people are admitted to hospitals due to being a victim to anorexia. In our society now, more people want to have that perfect body. Let me post this question to you- what is THAT perfect body?

You now have a task/homework from me. Go take a magazine, flip it open and ask yourself, the person that you see in the magazine, is it photo shopped? Let me tell you that most photos are photo shopped in magazines. What is wrong with our own figure without it being photo shopped!? More and more girls look at it and want to be just like the person that they see in the magazine. Anorexic patients will constantly see that they are fat when they are so very skinny already.

My point here is not to give you a talk on psychopathology but something more social. I feel that anorexic happens because of attribution. Let me do a little bit of recap from lecture. Attribution is the causal judgments about why an event or behavior occurred.

Let me put it in this way so that you can understand me better. What is the reason for someone to want to go on a diet or just simply, lose weight? I would suppose it is the way the society paint the picture of people being of a certain size. For example, what made me want to lose weight was because I realize that when I go shopping, I have to avoid some shops because I cannot pull off those nice clothes. I realize now that I attribute my size with internally meaning that I blame it on myself for eating too much and not exercising and hence, I am fat.

Let me twist that around a little so that you can see both sides off the theory. External attribution will then be me putting blame on the manufacturer for producing small cutting and sizes clothes. When one blames it on themselves (internal attribution) for not being able to wear certain kind of clothes, they go on diet- starving, exercising, whatever to bring the number on the scale down. However, in extreme cases, some of them can become anorexic.

Now, think it this way. IF, no one bothered about how one looked, or rather, no one pin pointed about people being of a certain size, will anorexia ever occur? I know anorexic is a mental thing and all and have nothing got to do with social- think it this way and maybe it could come up to be social.

Yet another question- What will you say when you see an anorexic person? Will you say that it is due to situation or self?

A song by Simple Plan just sums it all up pretty much.

Tell me what's wrong with society
When everywhere I look, I see
Young girls dying to be on TV
They won't stop till they've reached their dreams
Diet pills, surgery
Photo shopped pictures in magazines
Telling them how they should be
It doesn't make sense to me