@petealexharris

With regard to terminology:

looksmaxxing is the term used in the community of people who encourage each other to do this form of self harm. I try not to learn any of the bizarre and upsetting terminology used by pro-ana online communities, but there's plenty of it!

@Doomscroll @cstross

@petealexharris

(before anybody gets up my ass: yes, I know Karen Carpenter was bulemic. iirc she was also anorexic? but the whole world kind of understood eating disorders through the lens of what happened to her, for a long time, and her case neatly fits a model that I've seen people take seriously as far back as the mid-70s and as late as 2010.)

@Doomscroll @cstross

@petealexharris

I think anorexia nervosa is a pretty good comparison to be honest. From what I understand, the consensus has softened a bit since I was paying close attention, but it used to be that anorexia nervosa (in its classic Karen Carpenter manifestation) was widely understood as a response to political-economic pressures.

Some mental illness is fully organic in origin -- stemming from genetics or injury -- but a lot of it is the direct result of interacting with an inhumane environment. The three causes are not mutually exclusive, and mental illness caused by one can cause or exacerbate that caused by another. This appears to quite certainly be the third case -- interacting with an inhuman environment (the modern world) has produced inhumane pressures (these guys think they are worthless if they don't have sufficiently sharp cheekbones), and the inhumaneness of the world is a political problem (arguably, it is the only political problem, and all other political problems stem from flawed attempts to solve it).

@Doomscroll @cstross

@petealexharris

mental health and political circumstances are deeply intertwined, particularly when political-economic conditions induce specific inhumane circumstances.

(mark fisher analyzes this pretty deeply in various books of his, and is worth reading for his insights here.)

@Doomscroll @cstross