I often wonder what kind of teenager I would have been today. How I would have reacted to the social media present 24 hours a day in my life, how the fifteen-year-old me would have interpreted the media exposure of bodies. Not that 15 or 20 years ago there wasn’t an already well-established image of what physiques, especially women, should be like. We compared our hips to those of Mischa Barton, aka Marissa Cooper of The OCor Leighton Meester, the Blair Waldorf of Gossip Girl. Before, what worried us was an unreturned trill on MSN or a Facebook post ignored by our crush of the moment; in recent years everything has changed, moving the interest in appearance to a dangerously early age.

And if you’re wondering whether social media really has such great power over teenagers, the answer is yes. But it is not just a visual perception. The numbers describe a situation that specialists now define without hesitation as “an epidemic”.

A new enemy: artificial intelligence

We talked about it with Laura Dalla Ragione, director of the complex psychiatry and rehabilitation of eating disorders operational unit of USL 1 of Umbria and scientific director of the national DCA toll-free number of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. “Adolescents by definition tend towards emulation: they look at other peers and look for models,” he explains. “The problem is that on the platforms he finds unattainable models: no longer just filtered or retouched bodies, but images created by artificial intelligence”.

Dalla Ragione has been dealing with DCA for over twenty years and has observed this mutation in his patients: “Today there is another phenomenon: kids build a sort of avatar for themselves. With AI they create a self that is what they would like and use it on social media. After that they tend to no longer want to leave the house, because it is clear that in reality they cannot compete with that image”. In more serious cases this leads to social and scholastic withdrawal. Platforms, created to connect, transform into a powerful source of isolation.

The numbers of the epidemic and other forms of DCA are growing

June 2nd is the “World Day dedicated to raising awareness of eating disorders”, and never more than in recent years the data shows a reality that can no longer be ignored. As Dalla Ragione puts it bluntly, we are experiencing “an epidemic”. “The numbers from the latest survey, from 2025, speak clearly: in Italy there are around 4 million people suffering from anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder”.

The number is so high because “the range of the population being treated has widened: we have children aged 8, 9, 10, and then people who get sick for the first time at 40. Males have become 20% in the age group between 12 and 17 years, while ten years ago they represented just 1%. Men in general represent 10%”.

Gender differences exist. “Bigorexia or vigoroxia, the obsession with muscle mass, is common in boys,” explains the expert. “They always look flabby even if they are muscular and spend hours in the gym.” Linked to this are the risks of high-protein diets or anabolic substances. Then there is orthorexia, the obsession with healthy eating, which leads to social isolation and which affects 70% of men.

Finally, Arfid (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder) is gaining ground, a disorder that does not arise from the fear of gaining weight but from a problematic relationship with certain characteristics of food, such as consistency, color or smell. “It affects very young children, often between 3 and 10 years old, but it is starting to affect teenagers and young adults too.” Lowering the age makes the picture more complex: “Because the cognitive apparatus is less developed; the child cannot talk about his discomfort like a teenager. There are often more serious psychiatric and physical consequences.”

Self-harm and social media

“In the last 5 years there has been an explosion of self-harm among adolescents and pre-adolescents, which affects 60% of patients with DCA”. A phenomenon which, according to Dalla Ragione, is amplified by social media, where wounds are shown as “war wounds”, generating emulation.

Misleading “recovery” pages proliferate on TikTok: “Boys who say they are healed but weigh 30 kg”. The 500 calorie “What I eat in a day” content is also dangerous: “Today the influencers who worry us are not the ‘Ferragni’ of the moment, but thirteen-year-olds who give advice on nutrition and fitness from their profiles without any expertise to millions of their peers”. Added to this is the use of AI to create clones.

The increase in cases is also reflected in requests for help. Today, SOS Eating Disorders (800 180 969) receives between “25 and 30 calls a day, especially from parents, teachers, friends and partners”. “Unfortunately the eating disorder is ego-syntonic,” explains the doctor, this leads to not being “aware for a long period” of what one really is and for this reason it is the people close to who take action.

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DCA can be cured, the challenge is early diagnosis

The real challenge today is “early diagnosis”. “If action is taken within the first year, recoveries reach 99% for anorexia and 80-85% for bulimia”. The problem is that we often act when the physical change is already evident, but the disorder arises first, in the mind.

In his latest book Attack to the bodywritten with Renata Nacinovich, Dalla Ragione underlines how “the soul can be healed through the body”. Its centers use art therapy, music therapy and paths that help rebuild the relationship with body image. In some cases also with yoga and pilates.

The failure of Body Positivity and the social value of thinness

“Nutrition has become fertile ground for expressing discomfort, in particular anxiety and depression,” observes Dalla Ragione. In fact, DCAs have taken the place of other pathologies.

And here a contradiction emerges that is difficult to ignore. In recent years we have talked more and more often about the inclusiveness of bodies thanks also to Body Positivity. We criticized the culture of extreme thinness. Yet the aesthetic pressure does not seem to have weakened. Indeed, increasingly slender bodies, low waists and aesthetic standards reminiscent of those of the early 2000s are coming back into fashion.

“Body Positivity has brought out the problem but has not solved it”, comments Dalla Ragione, “Because the pressure towards a certain body type has remained very powerful at all ages”. This is also demonstrated by a German study from five years ago which observed how girls between 6 and 8 years old, after playing with a Barbie doll for just ten minutes, tend to eat less during snack time. A sign of how quickly thinness is internalized as a social value.

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Practical advice

“The body has become the identity of the self.” For this reason, projects should be implemented right from primary school and in families – where often the first comments on weight arrive without any intention of hurting: “In schools we should consistently propose the exercise of ‘not judging another’s body for a day'”. But it is clear that it is simpler to formulate than to practice: on social media in recent months we have read everything about the bodies of Arisa, Laura Pausini, Emma, ​​but also about Demi Moore, present at Cannes with a clearly different appearance.

The doctor’s advice for parents is not to express judgments on the body or criticisms on food choices, which would only make the kids shut down, but to offer concrete support: “Say: ‘We’ll help you, we’ll take you to a good professional'”.

I don’t know if fifteen-year-old me today would resist constant comparison with artificially modified physiques. However, I know that as a girl I had the time to build the tools that allowed me, over the years, to question the aesthetic standards with which I grew up and to distance myself from some of them. Today for many adolescents this path takes place in a more crowded, fast and pervasive environment.

Without hypocrisy we should recognize and work on how much we adults have also internalized the social value of thinness and how much we continue to comment on and measure bodies, including our own. Because DCAs grow within a culture that attributes to body an increasingly central meaning. And no boy or girl should feel defined by their appearance before they’ve even had time to discover who they are.

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