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Editing Selfies Causes Mental Disorders

Cast member Dwayne Johnson takes a selfie at the premiere of "San Andreas" in Hollywood, California. MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS
Cast member Dwayne Johnson takes a selfie at the premiere of "San Andreas" in Hollywood, California. MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS
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Editing Selfies Causes Mental Disorders

Cast member Dwayne Johnson takes a selfie at the premiere of "San Andreas" in Hollywood, California. MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS
Cast member Dwayne Johnson takes a selfie at the premiere of "San Andreas" in Hollywood, California. MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS

Editing selfie photos shared on social media by using modern digital features, can confuse people, and may even disturb their self-awareness, US researchers suggest.

In their study published Monday in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, doctors at the Boston University School of Medicine warned of the impact of these photos on a person’s body awareness.

The digital editing process may include skin improvements, color change in the face and the eyes, and teeth whitening. According to the German News Agency, all these improvements were previously made only in adverstisements.

In a statement on the study, Neelam Vashi, said: “Filtered selfies can make people lose touch with reality, creating the expectation that we are supposed to look perfectly primped all the time.”

Researchers led by Neelam Vashi noted that in a recent survey conducted over cosmetic surgeons in many countries around the world, 55 percent of the participants confirmed that one of their patients at least asked to undergo a cosmetic surgery that would improve their appearance in selfies. The rate of those doctors was 42 percent in 2015.

According to surgeons, patients who want to undergo cosmetic surgery to improve their images do not want to look like celebrities, but to maintain their features and beautifying them by making some improvements, such as fuller lips, bigger eyes, or slimmer noses.

The study authors considered that the widespread edited photos may reduce self-esteem in people, and may trigger body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), which makes people focus for hours on physical blemishes that do not really exist. This disorder can lead to social or functional isolation.

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Varieties

Farmed Production of Some Fish - and Seaweed - is Soaring

Farmed salmon -- like the ones grown in pens here in the Australian island state of Tasmania -- are easier to grow than some other fish species. Gregory PLESSE / AFP/File
Farmed salmon -- like the ones grown in pens here in the Australian island state of Tasmania -- are easier to grow than some other fish species. Gregory PLESSE / AFP/File
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Farmed Production of Some Fish - and Seaweed - is Soaring

Farmed salmon -- like the ones grown in pens here in the Australian island state of Tasmania -- are easier to grow than some other fish species. Gregory PLESSE / AFP/File
Farmed salmon -- like the ones grown in pens here in the Australian island state of Tasmania -- are easier to grow than some other fish species. Gregory PLESSE / AFP/File

The amount of farmed seafood we consume -- as opposed to that taken wild from our waters -- is soaring every year, making aquaculture an ever-more important source for many diets, and a response to overfishing.

According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, nearly 99 million tons of aquatic animals (fish, molluscs like oysters and mussels and crustaceans like prawns) were farmed around the world in 2023, five times more than three decades ago.

Since 2022, the farming of aquatic animals has been steadily overtaking fishing around the world -- but with large disparities from species to species.

Fast-growing species

The two biggest sellers on the market in 2023, carp and tilapia, mainly came from freshwater farming, while other widely-consumed fish, like herring, came just from deep sea fishing

Thierry Laugier, a researcher at Ifremer, France's national institute for ocean science and technology, told AFP that fish farmers choose species that grow quickly and with simple requirements, to be able to control the life cycle.

Sales of the most widely farmed fish in Europe, Atlantic salmon, came to 1.9 million tons in 2023, 99 percent of which were farmed.

"We know how to control the ageing or how to launch a reproduction cycle, through injecting hormones," Laugier said.

Asia main producer
Asia is by far the biggest producer of farmed fish, accounting for 92 percent of the 136 million tons -- of both animal and plant species -- produced under manmade conditions in 2023.

"For carp, it comes down to tradition, it has been farmed for thousands of years on the Asian continent," the Ifremer researcher said.

At the other end of the spectrum, sardines and herring are just fished in the oceans, mainly for profitability reasons as some fish grow very slowly.

"It takes around two years to get an adult-sized sardine," Laugier said.

He said farming of some fish has not yet been started as, "for a long time, we thought the ocean was an inexhaustible resource".

Seaweed

Little known in the West, seaweed nevertheless accounts for almost a third of world aquaculture production.

Almost exclusively from Asia, seaweed production increased by nearly 200 percent in two decades, to 38 million tons. It is mainly used in industry, in jellies, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, the expert said.

He said seaweed also has the major advantage of absorbing not just CO2 in the oceans, but also nitrogen and certain pollutants.

"And from an ecological point of view it is better to farm macroalgae than salmon," Laugier said.