Perception is Everything

We’ve long worried about overweight adolescent girls and depression.  While our culture’s obsession with thin and the reality of peer insults remain, a recent study from Penn State actually points to two other groups who are more at risk for depression.¹

Instead, it’s girls who think they are overweight but aren’t who have higher risk of depressive symptoms.  What they see in the mirror is fat; but the scale doesn’t measure up.  For “realists” whose perceptions match reality—for example, overweight girls who know they’re overweight—the presence of depressive symptoms was far less.

The other group experiencing distress about their weight is underweight boys.  While the report doesn’t list reasons, we can draw from a long-standing concern that no one wants to be “the little guy” amid cultural images of muscular and athletic bodies.  As former FYI writer Matt Westbrook pointed out several years back, this is a concern we don’t often take seriously enough.

A good reminder that while reality is important, perception tends to rule kids’ (and adults) thoughts and feelings.

1. This dataset included responses from over 12,000 teens and included the participants’ actual weight; whether they thought they were under, over or about the right weight; and their scores on a questionnaire that identifies depressive symptoms. [↩]

©2010 Fuller Youth Institute