Eating Disorders in Instagram. Making Visible the Invisible

Very little is known about how people recover from an eating disorder. This is an urgent issue because the rates of treatment abandon and relapse are high among people with these mental illnesses. Anorexia and bulimia are the most well-known eating disorders but other equally common eating disorders exist that can cause the same level of distress and physical deterioration. Eating Disorders are commonly associated with young, white adolescent women; however, research shows that men and people from different ethnic backgrounds can have eating disorders, too. People with eating disorders use social networks to share and communicate their experiences with these illnesses. Hence, social networks can provide useful information that can help us better understand less wellknown eating disorders, the experiences of men and people from different backgrounds and how recovery works. This thesis studies eating disorders recovery from the perspective of the people dealing with these conditions, studying their daily life with, and their knowledge of, these illnesses as shared in the social network Instagram.

Eating disorders are commonly associated with thinness; however, there is evidence linking eating disorders, stigma and stressful and traumatic life events. This thesis tackles eating disorders as personal life experiences and explores other factors influencing eating disorders beyond thinness, studying how negative life events and stigmatising stereotypes can shape people’s experiences with these illnesses. This thesis looks at people with eating disorders’ perspectives on recovery and strategies to recover and the influence that social relationships have in this process to better understand how eating disorders recovery works in practice. The findings suggest that people using Instagram to communicate their experiences with eating disorders understand recovery as a non-linear process and consider that medical recovery, defined as weight restoring, is not a longterm recovery but a necessary step to real recovery. Real recovery for them, in contrast, usually involves a deep personal change.