America, Canada, and the United Kingdom are smack in the middle of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week and, perhaps in recognition of that (as well as all the benefits they believe it will bring), the Royal College of Psychiatrists is calling for a new editorial code when it comes to media portrayal of healthy and unhealthy body images.

The College — which wants the new government to create a well-rounded forum of professionals in the advertising, government, and eating disorder fields — lists its current areas of concern as visual imagery, unbalanced articles, and inaccurate portrayal of eating disorders (the complete outlines of which you can read in the College’s official statement) and believes work in these areas could help stop the media from “promoting unhealthy body images and ‘glamorising’ eating disorders” and instead encourage them to “use images of people with more diverse body shapes, and help people feel more positive about their own bodies.”

Dr. Adrienne Key, consultant psychiatrist of the RCPsych Eating Disorders Section, briefly sums up the proposed forum:

The aims of the Forum should be to collaboratively develop an ethical editorial code that realistically addresses the damaging portrayal of eating disorders, raises awareness of unrealistic visual imagery created through airbrushing and digital enhancement, and also addresses the skewed and erroneous content of magazines.

I’ve sat on this for a couple of days and, so far, the only thing I can say I completely agree with is the promotion of media literacy in schools the College outlines in its official statement. I do think teaching people media literacy (which includes teaching them how to analyze and evaluate messages in media) is a good idea and lines up nicely with what Margarita Tartakovsky pointed out earlier this week:

Although recent surveys have confirmed that adolescent girls get much of their health information from the media, media messages themselves are not a primary cause of eating disorders. Messages that promote an unrealistic thin ideal can set unrealistic standards regarding body size and shape. The fact is, media messages have the ability to positively or negatively affect one’s body image and/or self-image based on the message and how it is presented. It is important that we teach individuals critical thinking when looking at media images.

But I’m not so sure how much help digital manipulation disclaimers will be. For example, when a teen girl sees a picture of a beautiful, thin model with flawless skin, I doubt any disclaimer at the bottom of the image is going to make her stop and say, “Oh, wait, this picture has been altered. I shouldn’t want to look like that — it’s not real.” I’d assume, after seeing the picture, any damage it could help do would already be done.

I know no disclaimer would have affected how I saw such pictures when I was a teenage girl. Of course, I didn’t have any kind of media literacy education to work with, so, the disclaimers that the images have been digitally manipulated coupled with a solid media literacy education might be quite effective.

I’m also wondering how celebrities will react to this forum, should it become a reality. Celebrities are often used as models for everything from the cover of magazines to your run-of-the-mill print advertisements, but unlike that of a model, a celebrity’s sole job description is not to model or help sell a product. Celebrities are actors, singers, musicians, sports icons — some of them might not react too favorably when they find out the media source has to tell the public their photos have been manipulated.

At the same time, we’re blasted with candid, paparazzi-captured images of celebrities without makeup, unfixed hair, and wearing “regular” clothes nearly every day, so celebs might not even care.

What do you think? Is the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ forum proposal a good idea? Do you think there are at least parts of it that could be beneficial? Do you think people likely to ignore the disclaimers despite media literacy?

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    Last reviewed: 25 Feb 2010