Harvard Med School Prof. to Deliver Lecture on Social Media and Eating Disorders

Dr. Anne E. Becker will give a talk titled “Is ‘Secondhand’ Media Exposure a Risk Factor for Eating Disorders?” on Tuesday, April 10 at 4 p.m. in Room 519 of the Hogan Campus Center at the College of the Holy Cross.  Her talk, which is part of the Katherine A. Henry ’86 Memorial Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.  

Becker is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is the director of the Eating Disorders Clinical and Research program at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Becker and a team of investigators looked at what happened when access to television became available on the island of Fiji. They examined Fijian girls who had access to this media. “People are influenced by those around them, and by what they see on social media from television to the internet,” says Becker.    An anthropologist and psychiatrist, Becker has focused her research on the impact of social and cultural environment on mental health.  Her lecture will examine the secondhand effects of social media on young Fijian girls’ ideas of female body image to determine if this exposure has become a risk factor for girls developing eating disorders. She will look at the greater implications of this secondhand effect on women in all societies.

The Katherine A. Henry ’86 Memorial Lecture Series, which is focused on women’s health issues, was endowed by Katherine Henry’s parents, in memory of their daughter who died in 1997.