“If I Unfollow Them, It's Not a Dig at Them”: A Narrative Analysis of Instagram Use in Eating Disorder Recovery

Abstract

Engaging with the encounters and interactions people have on social media opens the opportunity to think differently about eating disorder (ED) recoveries. We used narrative thematic analysis to explore the experiences of eight participants who regularly use Instagram and who are in recovery from EDs. Our analyses illustrate how participants engaged with Instagram in an active and agentic way, navigating discourses about EDs including who is impacted by EDs and who has access to ED recovery. Participants’ stories illustrate how engaging with Instagram in recovery sometimes meant disengaging from content that was not helpful in their lives and recoveries. They discussed the agency of algorithms and how unexpected content could derail them from using Instagram for connection and community. Participants’ stories also demonstrate how healthist discourses infuse social media content ostensibly about recovery in a way that requires the user to be active in moderating the content they engage with. Grounding our conclusions in work on healthism and biopedagogies, we encourage a systemic approach that focuses on what shifts might be made to reduce the need for people in recovery to be hypervigilant about the content they consume in recovery.

A New Materialist Analysis of Health and Fitness Social Media, Gender and Body Disaffection: ‘You Shouldn’t Compare Yourself to Anyone… but Everyone Does’

“…In some cases, this required the investment of time and effort but also a process of learning, for example, how to edit, what to like, or where to share particular images of themselves or others. As others observe [7], these are spaces that have the capacity to be both helpful or harmful. For many, opting out of social media was not an option, reflecting Hardey and Atkinson's [54] observation that there are rising social anxieties about being locked into digital communication systems but that it remains incredibly difficult to simply 'opt out'.…”

“…These have been made worse by the effects of the rapid growth in digital technologies focused on health and fitness or 'healthy lifestyles'. Digital technologies, particularly social media, are now recognised as having pedagogical capacities [2], with a growing body of work examining how young people now learn about their health through these networking platforms, particularly those that are image based [3][4][5][6][7]. Furthermore, studies are beginning to reveal the ways in which these platforms may be contributing to the growth of body imagerelated conditions [8][9][10].…”

“It’s like building a new person”: lived experience perspectives on eating disorder recovery processes

“…Some recovery stories are given more space than others; this can lead to particular, often privileged (e.g., white, able-bodied, cisgender, thin, etc.) versions of recovery coming to represent “the” story of recovery [ 23 – 25 ]. To understand what recovery looks like, it is helpful to understand more about the particular person seeking recovery—to gain insight into the context of their lives and relationships [ 15 , 26 ].…”