DR MAX: Breast implants won’t make you happy… no matter what Love Island says
Not surprisingly, the head of NHS England has expressed profound concerns that ITV’s hit reality show Love Island is doing great damage to teenagers and young women.
He said the obsession of the contestants (above) with body image, together with the adverts shown in the breaks for breast and cosmetic surgery, is leading to more people suffering eating disorders and mental health issues.
Until this week, I had not been one of the three million people watching Love Island.
But while at a friend’s house for a barbecue, the programme was on in the background and I had a look.
I was horrified by what I saw.
The cast of this year’s Love Island. Dr Max is horrified by the ITV reality show
Much has been said about the show’s banality and the depressing vacuousness of many of the participants, but — as someone with a job in mental health — what struck me most were their unnatural, freakish bodies.
NHS England boss Simon Stevens is totally right to be concerned.
Regardless of the impression given by such surgically enhanced and ludicrously over-exercised bodies, they are not normal. Walk down any street, look around and you can see what normal is.
Love Island — in a world in which there is a growing culture that values image over substance — will inevitably make normal people feel inadequate.
I spend my working life in health clinics, listening to young women who, after seeing unrealistic body images on TV, in ads and on social media, have developed eating disorders, body dysmorphia, a sense of low self-esteem, low self-worth and depression.
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So, yes, Mr Stevens is right to worry about the extra demand on our NHS mental health services that Love Island could trigger.
Like him, I was incensed by the adverts for plastic surgery during the breaks. There was no mention of the risks, of the complications or the fact that this isn’t the only answer to people’s insecurities about their bodies.
One advert featured scantily clad young women, smiling and dancing, with a voice-over saying: ‘All of these women have had breast enlargements … and they all feel amazing.’
Such cynical marketing made me feel sick to the pit of my stomach.
Already, teenage girls need no excuse to hate their bodies — yet here was mainstream TV adding to their self-doubt.
These adverts are immoral and irresponsible, and I felt duty-bound to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority, imploring the watchdog to clamp down on such adverts, which, I am convinced, fuel body insecurity among young people.
Indeed, a survey this week found that one in ten women watching Love Island is considering breast surgery.
I will keep complaining about this until there is a ban on advertising plastic surgery on TV.
Sadly, even a woman friend whom I consider to be otherwise very sensible has had her view twisted by the body image ideal portrayed by Love Island.
Recently, she asked me for my advice about having breast enlargement and explicitly mentioned the ITV show as a reason she’d been considering it.
‘My breasts look nothing like theirs,’ she said.
No matter that she is at least 15 years older than the preening narcissists on the show and has had three children.
What’s more, the winner of this carnal TV circus will undoubtedly go on to make huge sums of money out of a ‘career’ posing for photos and endorsing products on social media — thus keeping this vicious circle turning.
How refreshing it would be if there was a TV series that, rather than suggesting success in life depends on how ‘fit’ you look to the opposite sex, emphasised, instead, the importance of personality and achievements.
If that was put on our screens, I’m sure the NHS’s annual budget of almost £10 billion for treating mental health problems could be cut at a stroke — and our young people would be much happier.
From April next year, all doctors will be expected to ask patients about their sexuality.
The NHS has said it is obliged to enforce this policy to comply with equality laws.
This is utterly unnecessary: I strongly object to this kind of intrusion into people’s private lives.
Bureaucrats have no right to dictate what questions I and other doctors should or shouldn’t ask our patients.
If this wasn’t all galling enough, this week we learned in a report from the Department of Health and Social Care that one-third of those same civil servants overseeing this rule don’t want to answer similar questions themselves.
What hypocrites!
Britain’s first legal ‘red light district’, in Leeds, which was set up to safeguard sex workers, has been deemed a failure after a rise in the number of sexual assaults and crimes such as drug abuse.
There have now been calls for the introduction of an alternative experiment — the ‘Nordic model’, which penalises the sex buyer, not the prostitute.
Having worked with prostitutes in London over several years, I think this is a good idea.
It’s the best way of tackling the problems of sex workers being assaulted, of drug use and of the growing numbers of people-smuggling gangs who bring migrants here to work in brothels.
We’ll never eradicate prostitution — but we can stop the violence and exploitation.
No Minister, this is NOT a good idea for schools
Health Secretary Matt Hancock
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been widely praised for announcing that up to 8,000 counsellors will be sent into schools to protect children from the pressures of social media.
Sorry, but I think this is gesture politics — a cynical (yet empty) move to try to win plaudits.
For me, the policy is flawed because I fear the counsellors will not have the skills to identify those youngsters suffering from what Hancock describes, in a phrase redolent of TV’s Yes Minister, as ‘unhealthy online behaviours’.
I fear they will simply ‘pathologise’ levels of stress and difficulties that are part of everyday life — and so create groundless anxiety.
Admirably, Hancock says his children (aged 11, nine and four) are not allowed mobiles.
But rather than rely on ill-equipped counsellors, it would be better if mobile phone firms and the likes of Facebook stepped up to the line and did more to protect children.
Treat anxiety and you’ll cut heart attacks
A fascinating study this week showed how our mental and physical health are inexorably linked.
It found that patients who are prescribed an anti-depressant following a heart attack reduce their risk of a second attack by 24 per cent.
Of course, it could be that the antidepressant has some direct pharmacological benefit on the heart — but I think something else is going on.
We know that people’s mental health can have a profound impact on physical health. In particular, conditions such as depression and anxiety increase the risk of heart attack.
So, by treating any underlying low mood, we reduce the risk of this happening. Here, prevention really is better than cure.
When ‘care’ dehumanises the elderly
Research published this week suggests that staying in dimly lit rooms all day increases the risk of insomnia, depression and agitation in those with dementia.
The lack of natural light plays havoc with their body clock, so they struggle to sleep — and their mental health suffers, too.
It is, of course, a major problem in care homes for the elderly.
But lighting levels are not the only issue surrounding sleep.
In order to fit in with staff shift patterns, many residents in care homes are woken up early so that they can be up and dressed before the day shift comes on duty.
In one nursing home where I once worked, residents were woken at an ungodly 4 am.
In other homes where I’ve worked, it was the job of the day shift to wake the elderly, so many were not helped out of bed until 10 am.
What’s more, lunch would then be served at 11.30am. No wonder many said they weren’t hungry!
Dinner was served at 4 pm and they were in bed before the night shift took over at 7 pm.
Not surprisingly, I was frequently being called to see patients who weren’t eating their lunch or dinner, or who couldn’t sleep.
At the heart of this problem is the dehumanising of people, who are treated as commodities rather than as humans.
When you visit a good care home — the kind of place where you feel staff actually care, rather than just feed and water the residents — it’s the willingness to adapt to each individual’s needs that strikes you as so important.
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