Anorexia in the Virtual World

Bear with me. I am not a doctor or a psychologist, and yet I want to talk anorexia nervosa - and on top of that I am about to explain things most Residents of Second Life® will already know. This can get boring…

With what we call the Appearance sliders, any Second Life user can completely shape his or her appearance in the virtual world. Large breasts, muscular arms, a big nose - anything goes and one doesn’t really need a lot of skills to be able to whip up a good looking shape.

Now I was always convinced that anorexia patients have a distorted view of how they look. They do not want to look the way they do - they look the way they do because they have a false image of themselves. The Wikipedia article linked to above confirms this: one of the symptoms mentioned is [d]isturbance in the way in which one’s body weight or shape is experienced.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a patient create her own ideal female body shape in Second Life? Give her the time to make a shape which for her represents how she would like to look. Then take that shape and directly compare it to how they look in real life. Perhaps seeing pictures of the real and the virtual body side by side can help them see the truth.

As I said - I am not a doctor or a psychologist. But this thought struck me and it’s perhaps too valuable to just let linger in my brain.