Culture Bound Syndromes

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The degree to which television contributes to physical dissatisfaction, eating disorders, and life satisfaction in teenage girls and young adults is a hot issue that continues to be debated. Although the television debate touches on many important topics, the influence of television on teen girls’ physical dissatisfaction remains the most relevant and controversial. Studies on this matter have emboldened researchers to believe that television influences on physical dissatisfaction may contribute to eating disorder symptoms, which explain growth in eating disorders across the female demographic in the United States. Other critics, however, contend that correlations between television and physical dissatisfaction are not intrinsically linked nor …show more content…
Dr. Sumathipala, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, coined the name for television influenced eating disorders “culture bound syndrome” (Ferguson 2.) The term culture bound syndrome is used to describe unique syndromes that emerge in specific cultures. Of these syndromes Sumathipala studied, eating disorder syndromes took him by surprise. In over 200 clinical studies Sumathipala conducted, Sumathipala’s research and extensive interviews with his subjects were quick to “point out that increased incidence of eating disorders [in his test subjects] coincide with trends in the media toward emphasizing thinness in women. Sumathipala’s clinical studies in particular, “demonstrated a rising trend [in bulimia] and anorexia” in participating test subjects (Ferguson 2.) Despite Sumathipala’s success in correlating his subject’s eating disorders with television influences, his critics rejected his findings. Because Sumathipala’s studies primarily focused on patients with clinical eating disorders, critics claimed ruling television influences to be the only basis of their psychosis to be impossible. However, studies soon after on subjects that did not have
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