When Christian Jahn, a 37-year-old graduate student, was 13, he wouldn't leave the house without wearing a heavy Arctic jacket. In Southern California, that was enough to set him apart. But Christian was obsessed with what he deemed an even more troubling physical anomaly: He was terrified of his own face.
Over the next 15 years, Jahn almost flunked out of college, then dropped out of law school - all because of a fixation on physical flaws. Then he caught an episode of "Oprah" about obsessive compulsive disorder. A little more online research yielded another related illness: body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Suddenly, Jahn's mysterious and life-altering condition had a name.
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New Research May Help Those Afraid of Own Looks
1) The article about someone being afraid of their own face really jumped out at me. I have never heard of someone being afraid of their own face. I clicked on the link and the article is extremely interesting. Christian Jahn has been afraid of his own image since he was 13 and wouldn’t leave the house without his arctic jacket, which in California is obviously not normal. He struggled with this for years and had many failures in his life because of this. He saw an Oprah episodes and figured out he had Body Dysmorphic Disorder BDD. I have heard of BDD before but my understanding of BDD was a girl or boy who saw their body differently that what it actually was, which now I can see could cause someone to be afraid of their own image, but before I was just thinking in terms of skinny or fat. Someone skinny seeing their leg and seeing it a lot bigger than it actually is, but BDD can come in many different ways. Body dysmorphic disorder is described by mayo clinic as a type of chronic mental illness in which you can’t stop thinking about a flaw with your appearance, a flaw either that is minor or that you imagine, but to you, your appearance seems so shameful and distressing that you don’t want to be seen by anyone. It also says that body dysmorphic disorder is sometimes called “imagined ugliness”.
2) A group of researchers did a case study on people with BDD and compared them with a healthy control group. The method was participants underwent MRI tests and looked at two photographs one was their face and one was an actor, and the researchers studied the brain activity when the participants were doing this. They exhibited abnormal brain activity and researchers believe they are closer than ever to finding a cure for directly treating the brain function rather than just helping the patient function with his or her illness.
3) This article was very interesting to me. It is a very important topic, because people who experience BDD up to 80% of them have suicidal thoughts. I definitely learned more about BDD and the different ways BDD can affect you.
This is extremely interesting that this article would be posted now because on February first, a classmate of my older brother committed suicide after dealing with BDD for the past 15 years. I had never heard of this disorder prior to this, but in Andy's case, he always thought that there was something wrong with his face, but no one else could see this. From my understanding, there is not any treatment specifically for BDD, and in the article it said that the current treatment is antidepressants and therapy, but through their research they are trying to find the specific areas of the brain that are involved. I was suprised to discover that this disorder affects 1-2% of Ameicans because you don't hear about it. BDD also that our own visual perception can greatly vary from other peoples, and it is individually constructed. Everyone who knew Andy described him as a beautiful person, but he couldn't see that in himself. I don't know all the details of Andy's case, but I know that it can have devastating effects on the family and friends of the person with BDD, in his case, after Andy's death his father also committed suicide, which causes even greater suffering on the rest of the family. Thanks Cassy for posting this.. it really helped me learn more about this disorder
I appreciate your response Anna. That is sad to hear. It was interesting to me as well because before, I have always learned that BDD mostly was about your body thinking something wasn't the right size or shape. I never thought of it being with the face.
I found this article very interesting. I enjoy reading about clinical disorders, and thinking about more real world applications of the things we learn in our psychology courses. I think this article stresses the point even more that reality doesn't matter. What matters to every individual is their own personal perceptions of the world around them. In my night class the professor made the point that to every individual your perceptions are your reality, and no 2 perceptions are ever the same. And this comment really stuck with me. How you perceive something is how you experience it, and it's very hard to convince someone to believe in your own perceptions because they might not be experiencing it in the same way. With BDD, the person is fixating on a particular trait of their own body. They feel like everyone is perceiving this in the same obsessive way that they are personally. The reader stresses this point as well that people perceive colors slightly differently even when shown the same stimuli.