What Exactly Is Body Dysmorphic Disorder?

Today, you don’t need to be photoshopped for a magazine or airbrushed for a billboard to alter your appearance—with digital photo filters and editing apps, a new face is just one click away. So, experts are asking what effects that can have on people with BDD, a condition in which people think there’s something wrong with their physical appearance. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker (then hit the little 🔔 icon and select "all.") » Watch more Body Language! http://bit.ly/BodyLanguagePlaylist » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com You can completely alter your online image from the one staring back at you in the mirror. But that disconnect, the gap between real flesh and blood human to modified, idealized online persona, is starting to have an effect on how we see ourselves. And researchers are asking more questions about what these digital manipulations are doing to our perception of our bodies and self-image IRL. A growing number of studies show that social media can have a measurable negative impact on body image and self esteem. Some studies suggest that scrolling through altered photos, videos, and filters on social media feeds has also been found to be a trigger for more serious mental health conditions like anorexia, bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder. Body dysmorphic disorder, BDD, is a condition in which people think there's something very wrong with their physical appearance. People with BDD obsess about these perceived imperfections. It's not just a fleeting thought, or a few minutes a day. They think about it and worry about it a lot, typically between three and eight hours a day. And unfortunately, there’ve only been a handful of nationwide studies into how common BDD is in the general population. But these early studies reveal startling numbers--it’s estimated that BDD affects close to 2 to 3 percent of the population, that’s somewhere between 5 to 10 million people in the U.S. alone. #womenshealth #BDD #bodydysm