Body Talk-In an image-conscious city, educators try to inject a little reality into the discussion

Examination of treatment providers’ experiences when working with patients with eating disorders. Warren, C. S., Crowley, M., Olivardia, R., & Schoen, A. S. (in press). Treating eating disorders: An examination of treatment providers’ experiences. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention.

Body Talk-In an image-conscious city, educators try to inject a little reality into the discussion
By Kate Silver November 25th, 2010

Body Rocks featured in Vegas SEVEN Magazine this week http://digitaleditiononline.com/publication/?i=53549&p=38

After taking part in an evaluation of an eating disorder prevention program for adolescent girls and boys, I had the privilege to work with Dr. Courtney Warren, UNLV Dept. of Psychology.
http://psychology.unlv.edu/html/warren.html
The project involved implementing and testing a prevention program for racially and ethnically diverse, predominantly low income high school students. Dr. Warren spoke to students about
the reality of the media. She discussed the negative messages and how these messages they see aren’t actually true or real. They’re edited and extreme. Many of the photos shown referred to the predominately white, ultra-thin, airbrushed celebrities and models that surround us at the newsstand and elsewhere.

After all was said and done. Warren conducted a study of her own. She focused on more than 200 Latino teens to see how they were affected by images of thin people in the media. The Latino culture has always considered a curvier, more feminine female body the ideal, as opposed to the super skinny look that Caucasians lean toward. Warren wanted to see if that was true in these youth. She found that the kids she studied were just as susceptible to body image issues and eating disorders as their Caucasian counterparts. “The more the Hispanic kids compare themselves to media images, the more likely they were to have eating disorder symptoms. The more they aspired to look like mainstream media, the more eating disorder symptoms they reported. Her findings were published in the September issue of Sex Roles: A Journal of Research.

The best part about participating in this study; students who did suffer from a disorder were offered free treatment through UNLV. Sadly, looking back, many of those students parents didn't take the time to seek the treatment their son or daughter may have needed. This is a problem. I think I made myself clear in the interview with Vegas Seven, "something needs to be done."