Thinspo (thin inspiration) is positive anorexia reinforcement, like anorexic role model pictures.
Meanspo (mean inspiration) is negative anorexia reinforcement, like aphorisms demonizing fat or destructive critic.
Why are young girls so vulnerable to mental disease trends? What can we do better as a society to strengthen the resilience of kids?
Are you serious? Have you heard of qanon, anti-vax, scientology, pyrmaid schemes? We all are vulnerable to this stuff.
I think it's fair to say that kids are more vulnerable, though, for the same reason that they also get physically sick more. Immune systems develop through exposure, and they just haven't had as much exposure.
It's sometimes really hard to appreciate how much a moment in time affects the long-tail of history when you're living in it.
Thinspo was originally "thin and sporty" (Thin+Spo) and promoted a super healthy and physically fit lifestyle and positive choices.
Over time it has been co-opted by those with deeply negative body image issues, and those with anorexia fetishes.
I've just heard people saying it as 'in-SPO-ration' for so long that a -spo suffix seems more intuitively to be a truncation of -spiration.
The youtuber ContraPoints made a great video about such communities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0
Nothing to do with young girls in particular, nor "mental disease" in particular.
Adolescents are constantly trying to find some axis along which they can excel/stand out, in a way that gives them societal power. (They're trying to "win", without really caring what it is they're winning at. They're just aware that right now they're not winning along any axis, and that has to change.)
For women specifically, being beautiful is one thing you can "win" at that can give you power.
Now, separately, anorexia can happen to anyone—recent research has suggested it's a sort of dual to obesity, another way the ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus (VMN) can become deregulated and cease to output the correct signal in response to fluctuations in leptin levels. For obesity, that makes people eat when they're "full" (because they don't feel full); for anorexia and bulemia, that makes people not-eat when they're "hungry" (because they don't feel hungry, and do feel disgusted/nauseous at the idea of eating more just like someone who's already stuffed full would.)
Like obesity, anorexia isn't necessarily genetic, but rather seems to be a disordered "state" that the brain can get into, which means that it potentially has environmental "triggers", even if it's purely a neurohormonal problem from that point forward. Some scientists hypothesize obesity as being the result of "re-training" your brain by forcibly exceeding your calorie budget. Anorexia is hypothesized similarly: "re-training" by forcibly starving yourself.
So: take teenage girls who want to "cultivate beauty" in order to gain social power. Some of them think they need to be thinner in order to be more beautiful. At this point, they're okay. After dieting, some are still okay. For others—perhaps the ones who saw the largest gains in social power from their loss of weight—something in their brain breaks a bit, and now they can't eat regular amounts of food any more without feeling sick.
Note that that could have happened to anyone, at any time, who decided to go on a diet. We don't understand exactly what makes people more "vulnerable" to anorexia, but adolescents aren't especially vulnerable. Teenage girls are just more likely to be people who are trying to diet for the first time, and therefore are more likely to be triggering and exposing an underlying vulnerability to anorexia for the first time—which we end up describing as "developing" anorexia.
Compare also: the guys who obsessively lift weights to gain muscle mass—because "cultivating your physique" is social power for teenage/college-aged boys—but then, once they start, their "unfitness" becomes a self-image problem, and they can never be happy with how they look, no matter how "ripped" they get.
Compare also: the development of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. People find that "cultivating a charismatic public image" gives them social power, but then become unable to stop optimizing their public image, even to the point that they habitually lie to their loved ones to present every action in the best possible light.
I feel like there's some unifying neurological principle to how these disorders develop, though I've never heard one suggested.
In some countries there has been a huge fall in the suicide rate for women. It seems to be correlated with increasing opportunity and independence.
all kids are vulnerable. maybe girls are more sheltered? and..
> "What can we do better as a society to strengthen the resilience of kids?"
stop sheltering them, let them fail.
i am still a little pissed at pink floyd. i get what they are railing against, but yes, yes I do need an education. i nearly took that too literally when i was a kid.
Loads of teen boys are sucked into toxic online cults too including neo-Naziism, extreme misogyny, other kinds of toxic political radicalism, gaming addiction, self-help cults, etc.
No, because it would be something else than critical thinking. It's like the scientific method, where you can't dismiss any possibility, unlikely as it be, but pursue the most likely explanations first.
Conspiracy theories bizarrely pursue the least likely explanation. Granted, this explanation might be real, but until new data arrives (Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc.) it can't outweigh the simpler ones.
There are lots of online cults though, not just on the chans. Tumblr is particularly bad. Lots of little Borg minds looking to assimilate young novelty.
I was able to find stats on violent crime by youth (mostly boys), and unlike self harm by girls, the rates of serious violent crime have been trending down for years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/477466/number-of-serious...
In any case, there is a clear gendered difference in the average behavior of girls and boys.