Are British schoolgirls more anxious than ever?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/apr/24/girls-more-anxious-than-ever-report

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The past five years have seen a sharp rise in the number of schoolgirls at risk of emotional problems, according to a new study by University College London and the Anna Freud Centre. The study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, analysed questionnaires completed by 1,683 schoolchildren in England in 2009 alongside a demographically matched sample in 2014. It found that emotional problems in girls aged 11 to 13 increased by 55% over the period.

“Five years is a relatively short period of time”, says Dr Elian Fink, the lead author of the report, “so we were surprised to see such a sharp spike in emotional problems among girls. The fact that other mental health issues stayed about the same makes us think that there must have been significant changes over the past five years which have specifically affected young girls.”

To try to get to the bottom of the possible causes of the spike, I spoke to Dr Helen Sharpe, one of the co-authors of the paper. Hypotheses about potential reasons for the results, she says, must be treated with caution – the study itself was not designed to measure cause – but “One potential cause is body image, because it seems to go some way to explaining why we are particularly seeing this increase in girls.”

“A second factor, which goes hand in hand with that, is social media use,” she says. “There’s not much data on the impact of social media on young people’s wellbeing but it’s clear that it’s substantially changing the way in which young people are interacting with their peer group, and so would be worth investigating.” Because social media is “predominantly visual, it places greater emphasis on appearance”. For Sharpe, “it seems a reasonable hypothesis that this focus on appearance could have a greater impact on girls [than boys], given that we believe pressure on body image is stronger for girls, particularly at this age.”

One of the reasons social media has been suggested as a possible reason for this shift over the past five years is that the 2014 cohort may have experienced a more complete immersion in the online world than those studied in 2009.

Listening to Sharpe, I am powerfully reminded of a 14-year-old girl who recently told me, in a matter-of-fact way: “If you don’t have a thigh gap, you need to get a thigh gap.” Her peers, she explained, would take diet pills, restrict their food intake to just fruit, and exercise for several hours a day in an effort to live up to the bodily ideals epitomised by images on social media. She called them “Tumblr girls”.

And what social media represents is not just the proliferation of idealised images of women’s bodies, but also perhaps intensified pressure to relate those ideals to one’s own body – from selfies and filters to “hot or not” ratings and the endless competition for “upvotes” and likes.

In addition, adolescent girls often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place online. As one teenager explained in an Everyday Sexism Project entry, “I am 14 years old and society seems to be teaching young girls that ‘sexy’ is the way. We see it every day in magazines, social media, television, everywhere. And the moment in which a woman decides she does want to look ‘sexy’, she is suddenly a slut or a whore and anything that happens to her is her own fault.”

In another study, also published this week, data from more than 10,000 primary and secondary school students was used to examine the link between body image and emotional problems. A correlation between the two has been drawn before, but the authors of this new study set out to untangle the chicken-and-egg dilemma of whether one causes the other – and if so, which way around. Interestingly, Sharpe (who also co-wrote this second study) explains that here too there was a significant gender difference.

“In the children whom we studied from years four to six, it was quite clearly the case that emotional problems predicted later body dissatisfaction. So children who started feeling anxious and depressed tended to be the ones who went on to feel negatively about the way they looked – boys and girls.”

“But”, she says, “when we looked at the adolescent samples, (studied from years seven to nine), the same was true for boys in that sample, but for girls the whole directionality flipped, so at that age for girls suddenly body dissatisfaction predicts later emotional problems. So, it seemed for the adolescent girls there was something specific about body dissatisfaction emerging at that point as a risk factor for later emotional problems.”

The Journal of Adolescent Health study revealed that one girl in five is now at risk of emotional problems. Though more research is needed to pinpoint the precise causes of these issues, what we do know “from the results of controlled experimental studies and big population data”, Sharpe says, is that “even quite brief exposures to idealised images of unattainable appearance ideals have an impact on bodily dissatisfaction in young women”. That this bodily dissatisfaction might be the forerunner of later emotional problems is even more reason to take seriously the bombardment of unrealistic and idealised images young women suffer, and the pressure they experience when they interact with such ideals, both on and offline.