title: "I am a waste of breath, of space, of time": metaphors of self in a pro-anorexia group.
abstract: According to recent research on eating disorders, heavy users of pro-anorexia (pro-ana) sites show higher levels of disordered eating and more severe impairment of quality of life than non-heavy users. A better understanding of how pro-ana members self-present in the virtual world could shed some light on these offline behaviors. Through discourse analysis, I examined the metaphors the members of a pro-ana group invoked in their personal profiles on a popular social networking site, to talk about the self. I applied the Metaphor Identification Procedure to 757 text profiles. I identified four key metaphorical constructions in pro-ana members' self-descriptions: self as space, self as weight, perfecting the self, and the social self. These four main metaphors represented discourse strategies, both to create a collective pro-ana identity and to enact an individual identity as pro-ana. In this article, I discuss the implications of these findings for the treatment of eating disorders.
authors.affiliation: University of Barcelona, Spain figueras@ub.edu.
authors.forename: Carolina Figueras
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Bates
mesh_terms: D000855:Anorexia / Q000523:psychology; D001068:Feeding and Eating Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D036301:Qualitative Research; D011788:Quality of Life; D012649:Self Concept; D060756:Social Networking; D012944:Social Support
keywords: Internet; anorexia; discourse analysis; eating disorders; self