The number of people with eating disorders is far greater than the estimated 200,000, a conference on young people and body image heard yesterday.
Psychotherapist Suzanne Horgan of the Eating Disorder Resource Centre of Ireland said the number of people with eating disorders was greatly understated because people were ashamed of their condition or did not accept that they had a disorder.
Ms Horgan said she had seen a clear increase in the number of people with eating disorders presenting to her in the past three to five years. "Eating disorders are increasing among the young, and among males," she said. She has seen parents of children as young as eight or nine, who were worried about their child's negative body image.
She was speaking at the Young Lives - Images and Attitudes conference in Mullingar, organised by Breaking Through, a network for practitioners working with young people at risk.
Ms Horgan said eating disorders were always a symptom of an underlying problem. "The problem usually lies with the core belief system which involves a negative self image."
Eating disorders, drug use or other risky behaviours were a coping mechanism for these underlying issues, she said.
While today's teenagers appeared to be far more confident than teenagers 20 years ago, she said much of this was "bravado".
"They are struggling deep down. They are far more sensitive than we would have been," she said. Today's teenagers were far more conscious of their body shape and of how it matched the body ideal than teenagers of 10 or 20 years ago, Ms Horgan said.
They were picking up a negative self image from a variety of places, including school, magazines, television and other media outlets.
"We cannot blame the media for it but it can trigger something if a person is vulnerable."
Anorexia, bulimia and binge eating are seen as the most common eating disorders but Ms Horgan also highlighted two less well known eating disorders. Night eating syndrome refers to a type of binge eating where over half of total calories for the day are eaten in the evening or at night, but not for work or lifestyle reasons. Orthorexia nervosa is an obsession with eating healthily where people exclude foods because they believe they are impure.
