Attacks on body in the virtual era. An analysis of the phenomenon of Blogs Pro-Anorexia and Pro-Self-injury

Introduction. Although Anorexia and Non-suicidal Self-injury are different clinical diseases, there is a strong correlation among them, moreover both are bodily self-harming behaviours, found particularly among adolescents, above all girls. Nowadays for both these psychopathologies an increasing phenomenon appears: the birth of a widespread number of sites, blogs, forums, as virtual communities. Objectives. This research wants to analysis Pro-Anorexia and Pro-Self-injury italian blogs in order to describe data, reflect on the phenomenon and suggest some psychodynamic interpretation on the psychopathology developing into virtual groups. Methods. We selected 20 websites, 10 blogs Pro-Ana and 10 blogs Pro-Self-injury, still operative in 2014, which were divided in two corpus. The texts were analyzed separately with T-Lab (Lancia, 2004; 2008), a quali-quantitative software for analysis texts, in order to find the dimensions of meaning and themes present in a text under analysis. Results. Pro-Ana Blogs promote a strong “faith” system (on Goodness Anorexia), encourage the symptoms, giving advices of not eating and suggesting extreme diets, ignoring the uneasiness; whereas Pro-Self-injury Blogs bring into the foreground the disease and offer themselves as support sites. Both the Blogs produce an annihilation of the body and hide the risk of reinforcing the disorders, as literature suggests. Discussion. We consider both Blogs as primitive forms of narration of the Self and of relationships, where the symptoms allow a mirroring which fills the narcissistic gap of identity. We reflect also on the necessity for clinical psychologists to widen their knowledge on this phenomenon, to understand better the new forms of request of help from their patients