Dr. Teia Plana, psychiatrist coordinator of the Eating Disorders Unit of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, stars in the new chapter of the podcast Stay to eat. In a conversation that begins with the testimony of how her approach to psychiatry was and how she experienced the first cases of patients with anorexia nervosa, this expert explains that although the most common age at which this serious mental illness usually begins is between 15 and 19 years of age, there is an increasing presence of these behavioral disorders in children under 10, 11 and 12 years of age and also more people who debut with the disease as adults.
Dr. Plana, in whose unit she deals with children and adolescents (the disease is more common in them) talks about the importance of the professionals who treat them being empathetic with the patients and not being in an excessive hurry to obtain an improvement that requires her time and tells what she herself has learned from contact with her patients.
Although 70 percent of patients manage to heal, he explains that it is important "not to get into the lion's den and avoid behaviors or stimuli that can lead to a relapse, just as it is recommended to avoid risk factors for those who suffer from other pathologies." Plana also talks about those cases in which the disease is not overcome, according to statistics around 5%. Of these, half die for physical reasons as a consequence of the ravages of the disease (due to cardiac arrest or for not being able to overcome illnesses that would not be fatal for a healthy young person) and the other half due to suicide, a theme that until now it has been taboo and on which he considers that it is necessary to establish how we inform minors.
The expert insists on the importance of contemplating body diversity and recommends educating prepubescents about the changes they will experience during their development, normalizing this diversity of weights, and combating customs that are as ingrained as they are counterproductive. "Like when we greet someone to tell her that she has lost or gained weight judging him."
Plana regrets that in the 1990s female beauty standards were imposed with extreme thinness and unhealthy, and explains that currently the beauty benchmarks for many boys and girls are people on social networks whom they will never meet and whom they they want to look like The psychiatrist warns both of the increase in self-harm (some are spread on networks), as well as the increase in aesthetic operations or aesthetic treatments that have gone from a clientele over 40 to one around 20 years of age. "These are very young people who arrive wanting to look like the image they get with the filters."
This psychiatrist from the Clínic reviews those aspects that we should change in a society that is too obsessed with physical appearance and in which there is still a lot of work to be done to combat complexes that advertising or clothing stores, among many other examples, help to promote. As a society, she explains, “we have made progress in the search for self-care and personal well-being, but that in turn has led us to feel more dissatisfied. We have gone from self-care that was necessary to dissatisfaction.”
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