Women And Eating Disorders Essay

Many women and girls suffer from mental illnesses and eating disorders, due to the rise in the standards of what women should look like. These illnesses and disorders have cause many deaths because of the pressures society puts on women to be skinny, beautiful and “perfect.” Anxiety is the number one most diagnosed mental illness and affects up to 18% of the US population. Many people go undiagnosed for this problem and silently suffer when the help they could be getting could help them. Depression affects up to 6.9% of the population in US. Some of the symptoms to these two mental illnesses are very similar like self-harm, suicide, and eating problem. Approximately 40,000 people died in 2013 due to mental illness. The suicide rate has doubled …show more content…
Eating disorders also have risen in the past couple of decades. Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge-Eating Disorder and Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) all have many similar symptoms but all are horrible for your body. Anorexia Nervosa, or anorexia, is an eating disorder where the person hardly eats or does not eat at all in or to lose weight and become skinny but never thinking they are skinny enough. This can cause internal damage to the organs, bones and malnutrition. Bulimia Nervosa cause one to binge-eat food, regret it, throw it up or excessive use of laxatives and repeat all over again. This causes tooth decay because of the stomach acid, sore throat and severe dehydration but most bulimics maintain a relatively healthy weight and lifestyle. Next, Binge-Eating Disorder is when a person eats an excessive amount of food without the purging, fasting or obsessive exercise. They will eat even if they are full, not hungry or very fast in private. Lastly is the Body Dysmorphic Disorder, or BDD. This causes one to look at themselves in the mirror and see something completely different that the reality of their