 Why should we avoid using images that depict self-harm and eating disorders when teaching about these topics? I'm going to share with you three reasons why I think it's really important not to share pictures of stereotypical self-harm and eating disorders but before I do that I just want to reiterate I think it's really vital that we do actually talk about these topics so I don't want you not to teach about things like self-harm and eating disorders I just urge you not to use images like cutting and emaciated images which have traditionally been used alongside teaching these subjects. Now the reasons are these. Number one is that we can end up reinforcing an unhelpful stereotype. So with self-harm the images which will often go alongside that will be images of teenage girls and cutting and razors and this reinforces the idea that cutting is the only form of self-harm. Actually we know it's a very, very wide range of behaviours. It reinforces that this is something that happens only with teenage girls. Actually we need young people to know that self-harming can affect all sorts of different people of any gender and lots and lots of different behaviours. Likewise with eating disorders we often find that the kinds of images that are shown are of extreme underweight and actually that only represents a very narrow number of the people who are affected by eating disorders and in fact most people who are affected by an eating disorder will either be a normal weight or overweight. A small minority might be very underweight due to anorexia nervosa but most people with an eating disorder are not underweight so it's reinforcing again our unhelpful stereotype and again those images are largely often of females and we need our people to know that these are issues that can affect anyone of any gender and also any age and any culture and just anyone really. The second reason why we need to be careful about our use of images when teaching about self-harm and eating disorders is that sometimes those images can be actively triggering for young people who are vulnerable to those thoughts, feelings and behaviours in the room. So when we are sharing these images often what we're looking to do is to try and put people off from this behaviour. So we might think that by showing an image of extreme thinness for example that might make someone shy away from wanting to engage with eating disorder behaviours because you wouldn't want to end up like this. Likewise we might think that images of severe harm might make someone less likely to engage in that behaviour but we know that when we show these images in a class with vulnerable individuals that for a small minority of them it doesn't put them off from those behaviours but instead actively encourages them to engage with those behaviours and specifically when we show images of underweight this can cause quite a competitive sort of behaviour in young people who are vulnerable to eating disorder behaviours and a young person might see that image and instead of seeing something that they don't want to look like or be like or feel like instead they see something with which they want to compete and they might be already starting on the mental arithmetic of I wonder what that person weighs I wonder if I could weigh less than that how many calories would I need to eat or purge or whatever in order to get to that weight so these images might be off-putting of these behaviours for vast majority of your students but for the small minority who are most likely to be affected they can actually trigger the kinds of behaviours that we're looking to avoid. Number three the third reason why I think it's unhelpful to share these images is that sometimes when we share these images they can actively stop young people from engaging in help seeking behaviour now the reason that happens is that when we share images as part of our teaching we tend to show the extremes so we tend to show emaciation or severe self-harm and what that can do is it can send a message to a young person in the room who is engaging in these behaviours but perhaps whose weight is not extremely underweight or whose self-harm injuries are relatively superficial and it can send the message to them well you're not as bad as this so you don't need help that's not the message we're trying to send and we absolutely wouldn't want to stop our students from coming forward if they feel in need of help but sometimes when we share these more extreme examples it inadvertently sends that message so where does that leave us basically when you're teaching about these topics and please do teach about them it's not helpful to share these kind of sensationalized images of thinness or injury instead if you want to have images in your lesson what's really helpful to do is just to share images of a really wide diverse range of different people not looking to specifically portray eating disordered behaviour or injury but instead looking to show young people that this can affect any one of any age from any culture of any gender any skin colour any ability or disability any anything a really key message we need to get across here is that no one is immune to these thoughts these feelings these behaviours and we want to encourage help seeking from our students if they're worried about themselves or about a peer I hope this was a little bit of helpful food for thought I'm really happy to create further videos about the safe and sensitive teaching of these tricky topics as part of your curriculum if you think that would be helpful then do leave a comment below and let me know and I'll put together some further guidance for you and I look forward to hearing your comments and please subscribe and tune in for future videos on Tuesdays and Fridays thank you and goodbye