Breast implants linked to suicide risk? What is right about this article?

I saw this headline: "Breast implants linked to suicide risk" and this byline in the LA Times: "A report says that women who have had the increasingly popular surgery are three times more likely to kill themselves later."





Personally, I hate the idea of risking your life to have bigger breasts, or any type of elective surgery but I'm the practical sort and hate hospitals (I'm not referring to reconstructive breast surgery for breast cancer survivors).





-But something about this study didn't sound right. What is the percentage of women who killed themselves who had other types of cosmetic surgery, or is it just this type of cosmetic surgery?


-What are the rates of suicide among women who consider breast surgery, but decide not to have it done?


-This surgery was suppose to help women feel better about themselves...or is this just a scam to prey on women's fears?





http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/...

Breast implants linked to suicide risk? What is right about this article?
Evidently there is a lack of psychological screening prior to surgery - not just in the USA but in Australia too. I always assumed that pre-surgery counselling was mandated - surprise, surprise, it's NOT. Not all plastic surgeons are created equal - as a surgeon you can hang a shingle on your door with no training specific to this field (in Ontario, saw a news story 'bout this). Regulation of this highly profitable industry is lacking - and so it should come as no surprise that assessing patients' motives for surgery and expectations are not explored. According to the following Aussie article 'women who had breast reductions reported high rates of satisfaction ...People who had rhinoplasty, or nose-jobs, or facial work had more mixed results.' This problem is not limited to narcissistic, 'stuck-up women', as at least one poster here has erroneously implied. Body dysmorphic disorder is found in both genders, and I would hazard a guess that a helluvalot of male BODY BUILDERS are afflicted:





'One in 10 people who undergo elective plastic surgery may experience psychological problems afterwards, according to Melbourne researchers.





A review of 37 studies into cosmetic procedures and their outcomes for 3542 patients showed that young men, those with a history of depression and people with unrealistic expectations were at risk.





"People with a psychological condition called body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), characterised by an obsession with an imagined physical defect, were over-represented among cosmetic surgery patients, said Professor Castle.





"As psychiatrists we see people with body dysmorphic disorder who have commonly had surgery," he said. "They are referred to us because they have been so unhappy with the outcome or gone back and back to the surgeon or have even tried to do plastic surgery on themselves."





Up to 2 per cent of the population suffer from BDD, but surveys suggest that 7 to 15 per cent of cosmetic surgery patients have the condition...





"It is almost by definition that they'd be unhappy with the surgery because the surgery itself cannot deal with psychological problems,"...
Reply:I would need to read the actual report. If you have a chance to visit any library, request:








Invited Discussion: Excess Mortality From Suicide and Other External Causes of Death Among Women With Cosmetic Breast Implants.





Invited Discussion





Annals of Plastic Surgery. 59(2):124-125, August 2007.


Sarwer, David B. PhD
Reply:More and more plastic surgeons are having their patients go to see psychiatrists before having any kind of surgery done. Some women seem to think that plastic surgery will cure all of their problems when it doesn't.


I mean, before they have small breasts and feel like crap about themselves and after they have large breasts and feel like crap about themselves.
Reply:Women who get these implants may be more "desperate" than average, with worse-than-average impressions of their own body, and thus might be more likely to commit suicide.





Furthermore, if a woman gets breast implants and finds that those don't solve her problems (loneliness or whatever), then if she felt that the implants were "her last hope", she might be more likely to consider suicide.





I emphasize that these are theories; I don't know of any research studies on this topic.
Reply:Women who get implants are attention seekers, they think they can't be successful without them (having larger breasts). They have no self respect for themselves. Pretty selfish, self centered and greedy. No offense, they are just stuck up women.
Reply:The breast implant is incidental. All that was discovered was that among the breast-implant girls there are plenty of flakes.
Reply:I think I would agree with the article. Yea it may seem a little far fetched, and may not be something you can prove. But I think that if a woman is getting or has had cosmetic surgery, they are doing it for one reason- To look better. If you look better, you feel better. "most of the time'. Its the other percent of the time that cosmetic surgery didnt give women the satisfaction that they were in search of.... Maybe the women who were hoping to get more attention and got cosmetic surgery.... werent getting the attention they hoped for. That in turn makes a human more depressed than before the surgery... which leads to suicide.
Reply:I heard about the same thing on the news. My opinion, and maybe it's not right, if women who choose this kind of surgery, they are insecure with themselves. And if the surgery goes wrong, they can be miserable. At any rate, they are not happy with themselves physically, and that can cause low self-esteem and unhappiness.
Reply:I believe that this passage from the article explains some of the problem:





"Previous studies have shown that as many as 15% of plastic surgery patients have body dysmorphic disorder, a condition marked by severe distress over minor physical flaws. People with the disorder have a higher rate of suicidal thoughts and rarely improve after surgery."








Edit: While individual women may feel a lot of pressure to conform to certain images of beauty, it should also be considered that emotional self-indulgence is generally encouraged by feminist theory and by many in the therapeutic professions, though neither group would call it that. One outcome of this "validation" of feelings is that little attention is paid in Western conventional wisdom to the dangers of the compounding of emotions, as occurs in panic attacks and self-amplifying depressions. feminism also gets off on blaming social problems on the "patriarchy", and eating disorders are a key example, but it is the fashion industry that sets the stick-figure beauty standards, and this industry includes very few heterosexual males. Heterosexual males prefer their women "with a little health on 'em", as I once heard it put, for the most part, and are not guilty as charged.


___Also to be considered is the boom in that very same industry since the rise of feminism. Women have a lot more money and a lot more choices, and both of these are exploited by many to shop till they drop. Many a child-support-paying father has complained about the amount of support that goes to his ex-wife's wardrobe, only to hear, "I need these clothes for my career." This is one of the much-vaunted changes women have wrought on the workplace, that is, making it a place of wardrobe competition.


___The human practice of competition is often said to be a masculine thing, but it has a feminine aspect, that is, of course, ignored by feminists. To view the masculine notion of striving, one has to look to the writings of the dead white men of antiquity and the Middle Ages, when there really was a patriarchy, not the weak, nominal "patriarchy" that prevails today when man have to at the very least buy into some moderately feminist doctrines to get elected, and at most, are almost totally whipped by it intellectually. At any rate, an authentic patriarchy defines masculine striving over against one's context, guided not by comparison to other persons, but by the guidance of abstract ideals. One competes against one's own earlier performances, or against the constraints of the status quo. This was a central issues during the flowering of Classical Greece, when the earlier, more tribal traditions were being overcome, and the argument about whether one learned philosophy to win argments or to pursue truth is mentioned in 4 or 5 of Plato's dialogues. If one accepts the historical evidence that prehistoric cultures tended to be more feminized in both social structures and theology, then one can see at least a faint association of the more modern notion of competition as an inheritance of those earlier cultures.


___And so it is today. If one considers the notion of human striving and empowerment, and relationalizes it, as Carol Gilligan does with women's psychology, then striving becomes competition in comparison to other persons, or the modern notion.


___Feminism isn't very good at questioning assumptions. It pretty much takes the 600-year-old trend toward increasing emphasis on sensuous experience for granted, as it does for the trend towards validating the role of emotions in human affairs that began implicitly in the Renaissance, and became explicit in the 18th century. It goes along with the trend to increasingly define "person" in passive terms (conventionally, in terms of genetics or upbringing and social influence), while a person's own power and responsibility for the consequences for self-chosen acts falls out of fashion. This is the basis for feminism's victim arguments, but this trend also treats personal responsibility as a fantasy, and undermines the very basis for ethical and moral thought. Feminism also calls it's alterations of social arrangements "radical", despite the fact that "radical", like "radish" comes from the Latin stem meaning "root", and the alteration of superficial but important social arrangements, in accordance with the underlying conventional assumptions of modernity, is anything but radical. This sort of fundamental lack of perspicuity prevents feminism from understanding just how intellectually unimaginative it really is.


___Women who get breast implants are presumably mostly heterosexual non-feminists. In one sense, they enjoy the benefits and difficulties that feminism has effected on the larger culture, among them the "freedom" of emotional self-indulgence and the "freedom" (and consequent competitive necessity, since "everybody" does the same) to spend huge amounts of disposable income on appearance items, like clothes and plastic surgery. (Plastic surgery in general is another business that has boomed with the increase in women's freedoms.) Now, while the feminist portion of women with low self-esteem get to blame men for all their problems, non-feminist women with self-esteem problems are caught in the sexual turmoil of wanting to increase their attractiveness to the opposite sex, while having no brakes on the extremities that can be exploited to that end.


___The fixation that some men have for breasts is a big influence here, but then again, before plastic surgery, small breastedness didn't make all that much difference to whether or not women would get married. Furthermore, the recent proliferation of pornography correlates historically with the rise of feminism, and authentically patriarchal civilizations have little toleration for it. In fact, most authentically patriarchal civilizations have little toleration for sex other than for procreation, and this is part of a more general fear of the dangers of letting one's passions run away with one. The sexuality of today's men also makes men more easily manipulated by women, so while pornography may be repugnant to many feminists, it happens to serve the purpose of women's empowerment, even though it does so in ways that feminists prefer to avoid discussing.


___This problem isn't only a problem of male sexual preferences influencing women. A big chunk of the problem is one of the unintended consequences of feminism. But surely, this must sound like blasphemy to feminists.
Reply:I find it interesting that Western countries decry genital cutting in other countries yet encourage women to mutilate themselves in pursuit of beauty.


Anyone who must have themselves cut in order to increase their feeling of self esteem is psychologically in trouble to begin with. Once that surgery is completed and they realize they have just spent an enormous amount of money,and undergone a great deal of pain and their life has not changed one iota they must feel devastated.


Girls are so devalued to begin with that they focus on their physical appearance to bring them all the self love and happiness they should simply have in the first place.


I agree that this would certainly cause a great deal of mental distress and could lead to a higher instance of suicide. After self mutilation that would just make sense, not to mention the fact they may have lost all sensation in the nipple area and suffer from other side affects that are detrimental.


Excellent question thanks for the article.
Reply:I think it's more about the fact that many women who get implants are insecure, and unhappy. Theswe are both major reasons for suicide...
Reply:It is sad but it makes sense to me. For some it might be the impossible quest for perfection, happiness, youth, attention etc. It will make them happy, attract a mate etc but reality may fall short of expectations. You are really the same person and same age with the same problems you just have bigger breasts. Some, and it only takes a few percent to shift the data, may have serious problems and should be in therapy but some plastic surgeons overlook that in the screening.


My guess is the risk is somewhat higher for all elective cosmetic surgery - if a person has a big nose and gets a nose job without thinking it is going to drastically change their life - there is probably no more risk.