Dolly Loveday Baddiel has previously talked about her experience with anorexia as a teenager. She spoke about how being a part of an online eating disorder community affected her rehabilitation.
In the BBC2 documentary David Baddiel: Social Media, Anger And Us, Dolly shares how social media made it much more difficult to recover when she was very sick for about three years with anorexia in 2017 at the age of fifteen.
She said many teenagers look to develop their name online and while the social media platform did not directly cause her eating disorder, Dolly believes it made the situation worse. She revealed that being an anorexic gave her that sense of recognition that was reflected online.
Dolly shared that they weren’t allowed phones in the hospital, but when she came out, she struggled a lot after looking at eating disorder content online. She became all-consumed with the Journey of many individuals.
Her father was not aware of the extent of her daughter’s Instagram scrolling at the time, as her illness made her very secretive. David is an open book on many matters but had opted to keep his daughter’s experience private until then.
A self-described “obsessive person,” Dolly struggled with anxiety before the eating disorder. She says social media made her much more difficult to recover. Now she realizes that uploading before and after-treatment pictures were not about getting better but portraying a fake narrative to copy those she had seen online.
