body dysmorphia

Oluwabusola Oyenuga

PSY 650

Paper Plan

Diagnosis Option: Body Dysmorphia

Body dysmorphic disorder is an obsession with a part of your body being perceived as a defect or flawed and engaging in repetitive behaviors such as mirror checking, excessive grooming, skin picking, reassurance-seeking, and constantly comparing their physicality to that of others. These preoccupations can potentially be time-consuming and overwhelming that it impacts their daily functioning and becomes their sole focus.

I have an increased interest in anxiety and the various ways it can affect people, especially in social anxiety or social phobia. However, I became more interested in body dysmorphia during this semester in my adult psychopathology class when I had to portray the thoughts and behaviors in the style of a patient with body dysmorphic disorder. The role-playing opened my eyes to the concept that many adolescents tend to suffer from the same thoughts and behaviors. Social media plays into this idea of what the perfect body should look like, which leads to people comparing their body with that of a celebrity, losing weight, or gaining muscles to meet the ideal body criteria. There are extreme cases of the lengths one would go to, to obtain the “ideal” image of satisfactory they envision like plastic surgery and bleaching their skin.

My paper will show the different body dysmorphia from the mild to the extreme cases and how each one is treated.

American Psychiatric Association. (2017). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC.

Heyes, C. J. (2009). Diagnosing culture: Body dysmorphic disorder and cosmetic surgery. Body & Society, 15(4), 73-93.

Reinsmith-Jones, K., Adedoyin, C., & Zipkin Campbell, E. (2014). Spiritually based treatment for people with Body Dysmorphia Disorder: The Reinsmith-Jones model as a proposed model of treatment. Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought, 33(3–4), 300–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/15426432.2014.930633