Adolescent eating disorders skyrocketing post-pandemic: report
As it has in so many harmful ways, the pandemic has amplified yet another dangerous trend among young people: the rise of eating disorders.
Fueled by their round-the-clock use of social media, Americans under the age of 18 have high rates of “behavioral health conditions,” according to new data from Trilliant Health, with a 107.4% hike in eating disorder diagnoses between 2018 to 2022.
Anxiety and depression — known aggravators of eating disorders — also increased during the same time period.
The report echoed findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year, which revealed that emergency department visits among adolescent girls with eating disorders doubled during the pandemic.
Now, experts are saying patients are coming in droves and are “sicker than ever.”
“The kids are not OK,” Melissa Freizinger, Boston Children’s Hospital’s associate director of the eating disorder program, told NBC News. “As the pandemic started and then progressed, we kept thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to get better in 2022. Oh, it’s going to get better in 2023. But it hasn’t.”
By quarter two of 2022 – approximately April of last year – “behavioral health volumes” soared more than 18% above pre-pandemic numbers, according to Trilliant Health’s new report.
New York-based patient Megan Bazzini, 22, told the outlet that the pandemic aggravated the symptoms of her eating disorder, which she has recovered from since her teenage years. “Before Covid, if your thing was going out for dumplings with your friends, and you said you didn’t want to do that because of your eating disorder, you’d stop getting invited to hang out,” said Bazzini.
But suddenly, going out to eat was no longer accessible during lockdowns and the restrictions that followed. She was no longer trapped in social settings where she “needed to eat to make other people happy.”
“Eating disorders thrive in secret,” she said.
A staggering 22% of kids and adolescents show signs of eating disorders, according to a study published in February.
The uptick, according to Trilliant Health, coincided with increased social media usage.
“Since the onset of the pandemic, visits for eating disorders, depressive disorders and self-harm among patients below age 18 increased at rates higher than the overall population and are correlated with increased utilization of social media,” the report reads.
A survey from Common Sense Media reported that 84% of teens use social media such as YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok. Armed with algorithms that learn from the user’s interests, the results have yielded disastrous.
“We’re seeing these algorithms target teens and make the content they see more extreme,” Dr. Jessica Lin, an adolescent medicine physician at Cincinnati Children’s, told NBC News.
If the young user was looking for home workout videos during lockdown, “suddenly the algorithm says they’re interested in exercise and diet content, and it just keeps showing up and worsening,” she added.
Past reports have suggested that social media apps exacerbate mental health issues across the board — but particularly eating disorders.
In 2021, Instagram was said to worsen body image for one in three teen girls. Then came TikTok, on which “body checking” clips and low-calorie “what I eat in a day” videos run rampant.
Now, amid a frenzy for weight loss drugs such as Ozempic and a resurgence of gaunt frames, the pervasive content is rearing it’s ugly head.
“Now that high-fashion runway brands are putting skimpy clothes on the runway for restrictedly scrawny and bare women, it trickles over to fast-fashion brands in the matter of days or even hours,” high-fashion blogger Hunter Shires, known as the High End Homo online, previously told The Post.
“The next minute, the clothes that suit lanky girls are all over your ‘For You’ page, Instagram feed and Twitter timeline.”
But being the center of government probes and investigative reports has prompted the tech giants to step up.
In April, YouTube amended its community guidelines “to better protect the community from sensitive content that may pose a risk to some audiences.” The update included the power to remove “imitable content,” restrict certain age groups and show crisis resource information on videos about certain topics.
Eating disorders affect an estimated 9% of the global population, and more than 28 million Americans are expected to develop an eating disorder in their life, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.
They are the second deadliest mental illness – after opioid overdoses – and result in more than 10,000 deaths every year.
