A study by a Mumbai-based cosmetic surgeon has claimed that obsession with selfies was driving people to seek a little nip & tuck.
New Delhi: They are everywhere: Inside Metro trains, hanging from the sunroofs of moving cars, at the mall, and even at memorials for genocide victims. But while the alleged “selfitis” condition may manifest in obnoxious ways at times, the jury is still out on whether it is a measure of mental health.
Dr Debraj Shome, a Mumbai-based plastic surgeon, created a flutter this week when he sought to link one’s proclivity for clicking selfies with their chances of getting plastic surgery.
“Our latest research shows that taking, altering, and posting selfies lowers self-esteem, promotes body dysmorphia and increases the desire for plastic surgery,” said Dr Shome on 22 January at a Delhi event, quoting a study he conducted among 300 patients.
Body dysmorphic disorder is a condition where people spend hours every day obsessing over perceived flaws in their appearance, for example, a nose deemed not shapely enough and lips not “desirably plump”.
The Indian plastic surgeon is not the first to draw this conclusion: In August 2018, the Boston Medical Centre, US, released a study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Facial Plastic Surgery, suggesting that young people were going under the knife to look like they did in “filtered” photographs.
Photo filters are a wildly popular innovation, in-built in several social media apps, that allows people to tweak their looks: While more innocuous versions let you add a dog’s snout or bunny ears to your face, others help you clear the skin, “contour” your cheeks, change your eye colour, and even make your lips plumper.
The US researchers labeled this condition ‘Snapchat dysmorphia’, in reference to the social media app that helped popularise selfie-altering techniques.
However, not all psychiatrists buy this suggestion.
“Selfie-taking is certainly on the rise but it cannot be concluded that selfie-taking definitely increases need for plastic surgery,” Mumbai-based psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty told ThePrint.
“We cannot conclude that selfie-taking behaviour would lead to body dysmorphic disorder,” he added. “Most of the time, people with body dysmorphic disorder steer clear of ever taking selfies.”
Dr Avinash De Sousa, also a Mumbai-based psychiatrist, agreed, saying it would be incorrect to say selfie-taking stoked any mental disorder, or clinical anxiety or depression.
De Sousa, who has counselled 20 selfie-obsessed people since 2017, some who took 50-100 photos of themselves a day, suggested that the fixation was not a cause, but the symptom of an underlying condition. “Excessive selfie-taking is symptomatic of an already existing underlying cause,” he added.
A dangerous obsession?
In the social media universe, selfies are omnipresent. While most are harmless, the quest for shocking selfies has often landed people in fatal situations. According to a global study, 259 people died between 2011 and 2017 while trying to click extreme selfies.
The potential impact of a selfie obsession on a person’s general well-being has emerged as an area of interest for not just researchers, but also journalists observing the advent of social media.
In 2017, a study seeking to explore the obsession was widely, and wrongly, reported as having concluded that ‘selfitis’ is a genuine mental disorder. The Guardian was among the prominent newspapers that misreported the study.
Meanwhile, a report in Deccan Chronicle last year quoted a Hyderabad-based psychologist as saying that ‘selfitis’ was a mental disorder.
However, the American Psychiatric Association, a highly respected institution in the field, sought to settle the matter with a tongue-in-cheek section on its website: “Given the rise in popularity of the selfie, a mental health condition of selfitis — an obsession with taking selfies — sounds like it could be real. But selfitis is not a recognised mental disorder.”
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‘Deeper analysis needed’
According to a press release issued by Shome, his study was conducted on 300 people aged 18-40 years from Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, who visited his clinic for cosmetic surgery.
As part of the study, the mood of the respondents was measured after they took and posted selfies, with filters and without. The analysis was conducted through a “series of” visual analogue scales, a psychometric tool that relies on visual representation of feelings — through smileys, for example — to measure the intensity of an emotion.
Shome’s study reportedly revealed that 65 per cent of the women and 62 per cent of the men made to post selfies as part of the study said photographs were an “important reason” to seek cosmetic surgery”.
Sixty per cent of the male respondents and 65 per cent of the women, the study said, also reported an increase in anxiety after posting a selfie, untouched or retouched, while 61 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women were found to have decreased confidence.
The study also said the “majority of” respondents “wanted to undergo cosmetic surgery/cosmetic procedures” to change their looks after clicking selfies, but this finding is questionable given that the participant pool exclusively consisted of people seeking a nip and tuck.
Shome said he was convinced by his research that front-facing “selfie cameras” in smartphones must be banned.
Asked about the study, Shetty said the subject required a “far more in-depth analysis of each individual’s psychological profile”, adding that any such examination must be conducted by “professionals trained to do so”.
“Without knowing who measured the psychological changes it is hard to say whether the results are accurate. Such research requires more rigorous analysis and must be replicated by other independent researchers for these findings to be accepted as strong, reliable conclusions.”
Similar to Shome’s research, a 2016 “exploratory” study by Dr De Sousa on Class XI students of a Mumbai school noted an increase in body image dissatisfaction among girls, and called for “more focused research” on “behavioral addictions such as selfies”.
However, Dr De Sousa will stop short of calling excessive selfie-taking a condition.
The typical treatment for someone exhibiting an obsession includes reducing access to smartphones and verbal counseling, he added. Only six of his patients, he said, required medication and that too for an underlying psychiatric condition.
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