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.
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Media literacy is a key factor to helping adolescent girls and boys understand the messages they are being sent. Since media messages are interpreted differently by everyone, it could open a discussion amongst teens about what they are seeing and a range of emotions, topics and more could be discussed. Although it is possible for people to ignore the disclaimers, it would be beneficial especially for children who are at an age when they are still trying to learn about fact and fiction, especially with what improvements and adjustments can be made to any form of media they may encounter. We can find a similarity with these disclaimers to that of nutrition labels-the purpose is to benefit the audience in becoming more aware of what they are consuming. Being media literate and having the ability to deconstruct media messages and make decisions about what they are seeing is a useful tool for any adolescent.
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