To ask for Pro Ana sites to be removed?

[cls77]

Watched Supersize vs Superskinny tonight and was really shocked at the new craze of pro Ana sites encouraging/giving tips to sufferers of eating disorders? I am an ex sufferer of both myself and even at my worst would not have looked at these sites? One of them even says it's a supportive site and if you aren't a sufferer then you can't enter the site? You can guess what's there if you do look. Surely this should be banned?

I saw that. It was awful. That poor girl said they sent her a bracelet to supposedly show consolidarity but really it was to remind you when you lifted your hand to your mouth that you shouldn't eat.

I used to have an ED and I went on them.

In their defence, people asking for tips when they didn't already have an ED were highly slated.

Personally at the time I was going through a very difficult time and it really helped having the support and understanding of people who know what its like. I couldn't talk to my friends about it because they wouldn't understand so having people who really knew what its like to talk to really helped.

It's not new. They were all over livejournal when I was a teenager, full of tips and advice. Disguised as support to get better but really just thinspiration and ways to avoid food. If they get deleted they just pop up again somewhere else.

Nothing new unfortunately.

A lot of web hosting companies will consider pro-ana/pro-mia sites to be breaking T&C and will shut them down if told about them.

Unfortunately I was on a site that wasn't pro-ana/pro-mia which had to change web hosts fairly often as it kept being reported to the hosts as being pro-ana.

forever the one I saw tonight had a letter both from Bulimia and Anorexia, and was not in a supportive context in any way whatsoever? Of course support networks are fantastic, but there are some extremely scary ones out there encouraging sufferers not to listen to their parents as "that's their job to worry, but they really believe you're a failure" etc
How is that right?

I had no idea these sites were there until tonight.
My dd is 12, scary shit :(

I had anorexia for many years, at it's worst when I was 13-16 (about ten years ago) I browsed pro-ana websites on a regular basis. They're not a new thing, but they don't seem too easy to find actually, unless you know about it!

These websites should be shut down, and I believe that is the goal - the ones I kept visiting did eventually get shut down due to the content.

If you come across a pro-ana site (as long as it really is pro-ana and not a support site) then use somewhere like Who Is to find the web host and report it to them.

Why should anorexics be banned from talking to each other or publicly discussing their eating disorder and habits? You going to demand the banning of feeder sites next? Fat 'acceptance' sites where they insist not only on their right to eat themselves to death but to inflict those habits on their children. What about the depressed, bipolar, alcoholic....? What about sites which promote extreme sports? They have high disability and death rates.

This attention and attempt to 'ban' is only ever focused on anorexics, presumably because they're young females. It's wrong to ban some people from creating sites based on their mental issues and not others. I'd rather live in a free society than one which bans people from talking about themselves to protect the feelings of people like you who don't like what you're hearing/seeing.

If we ban everything someone dislikes, eventually there'll be nothing left, including this site.

perlona The pro-ana sites fall into the same category of websites which encourage/promote suicide. They do break their web hosts T&C.

No one is banning sufferers talking to each other, just not allowing encouragement/promotion of harmful actions.

Agree Murder

Perlona I am not suggesting banning forums and sites offering support or a shared place to discuss their problems, but these are very different, they are Pro because they are encouraging the disease, giving tips, sometimes ridiculing not complying with the "rules" THAT is what I have an issue with, hence why it was researched on the programme tonight.
I can't believe I didn't know about them though.

They are nothing new, I remember looking at them when I was 14, I'm 28 now.

I personally believe in free speech, so no I don't think they should be banned.

as has been said sadly they are not new I think you maybe be able to report them they are damaging to children , I cant remember the internet watchdog b

I agree with Perlona... if you try to ban these sites they will just go underground and you won't find them or know when your children are on them.

It is also an abuse of 'free speech' however much one might want to dissuade people from using these sites.

In my view, a better way to tackle them is to bring them into the open, show your children that these people are actually ill, have no choice and wouldn't choose to live that way if they had that choice. They are missing out on a great deal and those that manage to live with the illness can look forward to a 'lifetime' of pain and unfulfilled dreams of career, relationships, potentially parenthood and just the joy and challenge of living.

I was watching a half-documentary recently where young teen girls were 'celebrating' pro-ana, the thinness and control and greatly admiring the super-slim celebs... it was a different side of the coin though to look at non-celeb, older women with the disease and the doctor was matter of factly warning these girls that they could kiss goodbye to their looks too. "Anorexia might be clouded with the glamour of youth but nothing will cover it once the bloom has gone.". I thought that was quite a sobering - and helpful - way of looking at it really.

If anything, Anorexia needs to be normalised as just another illness like any other and the mystique and misplaced 'glamour' of it, removed.

I'm sorry for any parent who is watching their child go through this awful illness right now.

There used to be a very famous american site called "thinvision" IMO, it wasn't a pro-Ana site it was a cult. I stumbled upon that website at 11 and within about a week I'd been completely drawn in. I didn't have anorexic tendencies before this, but what was said on that website made me feel like starving myself would be the answer to all my problems. The forums were rife with hundreds of very very ill girls and I'm sure an awful lot of trolls. Members of "tv" as it was affectionately known were encouraged to give out their personal details to other members for support. It got to the stage where at 11 I would have several 16 year girls sending me texts telling me to not dare eating and I was better off without worthless food.

Then there were the weightloss competitions, where girls would go head to head on a thread to see who could lose the most weight in a week. Some

Posted too soon.....

Some of what went I saw on that thread was shocking. E.g. "Eat blueberries before your binge, because then you will know you have to keep being sick until you see the blue"

I could go on and on about it, but honestly it's affected my life, I still have eating issues now.

There are many recovery-focused sites where people suffering from ED's can go to gain support, and share experiences with opthers. the difference is that these sites are about swapping tips, encouraging dangerous, life threatening behaviour, and hiding symptoms. They feed on the competitive nature of the illness (no pun intended).

It's not just anorexia, the sites encourage binge eating, purging behaviours (common in bulimia as well as anorexia) too.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20595897

It's not new, they were around and well established over 10 years ago.

Whilst they are certainly not fantastic, they do no cause anorexia. An anorexic would be so without them.

"Whilst they are certainly not fantastic, they do no cause anorexia. An anorexic would be so without them."

May be true, but they might not be so ill/beyond help without those sites.

Dixie While I was never a member of any pro-ana sites, I knew people (through the support site) who were, I also visited some pro-ana sites at the time. The competitiveness and the "advice" were terrifying.

Thankyou for sharing that Dixie I know too well that my anorexia was triggered from a frightening experience and had I known about these sites at the age of 12 when it started I would have gone down a much darker path and never recovered as well as I have. I have long term health effects now and my dd knows why, I agree with LyingWitch in educating and talking about the illnesses freely with our children and friends/family. As this is the best way to deal with it.
It just troubles me that sites such as these encourage the competitive behaviours as described in posts here, and true anorexia and bulimia isn't like that, you cannot control your controlling behaviour, if that makes sense.

I think I hadn't heard of them as my anorexia and bulimia started 24 years ago, the internet wasn't even about then!

How can these sites be supportive, if they're pro anorexia....?

Am I missing something blindingly obvious?!

presumably because they're young females.

Not all anorexics are young females. Some of them are older, some of them are even male.

There is nothing at all new about these sites, they have existed since the Internet was readily available to people in their homes.

JapaneseMargaret you ask how they can be supportive. I had the same question when I first started writing about them. Having now trawled endlessly (not recently I have to admit but a few years ago when I wrote about them) I have seen that they can in fact be supportive.

In my experience when a girl was feeling low (and I mean suicidally so) these girls helped one another out and listened. They did support each other into recovery and a question I asked myself was where do they go to be listened to in quite the same way if those sites disappear? The girls and boys on there were highly intolerant of people who wanted an eating disorder and almost all accepted they were unwell.

There are of course exceptions to this I can think of two sites which lauded there lifestyle and operated more as a pro-ana magazine, no idea if it still exists, it even had recipes etc. That site definitely took the view it was a 'lifestyle' choice rather than an illness - very dangerous.

The only aspect of the sites which is very concerning is the element of competitiveness which it encourages, and the posting of photographs both 'thinspirational' and worse those of themselves.

On the plus side pro-ana culture did spawn amazing eating disorder support support sites such as the 'We Bite Back' forum whcih describes itself as post-pro-ana and provides the same support system with a zero tolerance approach to tip giving and any wallowing or competitive aspects to disorders. The majority of this site is made up of people in recovery - some quite amazing women in particular - and fills that need for support without the downside.

Incidentally, I did mention girls/women more in my post - that is because the sites were predominantly populated by females but that isn't to say that eating disorders are exclusively suffered by women OR that there were no men at all on these sites (there just weren't that many) or at least that was true a few years ago.