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Stigma Is Part of Daily Diet

A study reported in the August 2003 Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, for example, revealed that children who were teased about being overweight were more likely to have a poor body image, low self-esteem, and symptoms of depression than were children who were not so harassed.

"I think that being fat is particularly hard on children, and the obesity epidemic has reached down into childhood to an incredible degree," Albert Stunkard, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and an obesity researcher, commented in a recent interview.

Stunkard and his coworkers have found that American youngsters are less eager to befriend an overweight child today than they were 40 years ago. "You would think that with more obesity, stigma would be lessening, but it seems to be getting worse," he observed.

Americans often take a dim view of overweight adults, Michael Devlin, M.D., an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a binge-eating investigator, told Psychiatric News, and the scorn can hurt those at whom it is directed.

"It has to do with how difficult it is to be obese in our culture, stigmatized, and how desperately people feel they want to fix the problem," Devlin explained. "And by its nature, it is not a problem that one can address easily or quickly or completely in most cases."

Numerous studies throughout the years have underscored the diminished value that society places on obese people, Stunkard pointed out, and their findings—for instance, that obese people earn less money in comparable jobs—are undoubtedly as relevant today as when they were first published.

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