David Veale is an honorary senior lecturer at the Royal Free Hospital and University College Medical School, University College London and a consultant psychiatrist at The Priory Hospital North London (Grovelands House, The Bourne, Southgate, London N10 3NA. E-mail: David{at}veale.co.uk). His main interests are in cognitive-behavioural therapy and its application to anxiety disorders.
The DSM-IV classification of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) refers to an individual's preoccupation with an imagined defect in his or her appearance or markedly excessive concern with a slight physical anomaly (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). An Italian psychiatrist, Morselli, first used the term dysmorphophobia in 1886, although it is now falling into disuse, probably because ICD-10 (World Health Organization, 1992) has discarded it, subsuming the condition under hypochondriacal disorder.
The most common preoccupations are with the nose, skin, hair, eyes, eyelids, mouth, lips, jaw and chin. However, any part of the body may be involved and the preoccupation is frequently focused on several body parts. Complaints typically involve perceived or slight flaws on the face, the size of body features (too small or too big), hair thinning, acne, wrinkles, scars, vascular markings, paleness or redness of the complexion, asymmetry or lack of proportion. Sometimes the complaint is extremely vague; it may amount to no more than the patient feeling generally ugly.
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On average, BDD is diagnosed 10 years after first presentation and it is often treated inappropriately with antipsychotic medication (Phillips, 1998). Psychotherapists may have little experience in treating BDD patients or lack an effective treatment model. Two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have been conducted in BDD for cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) against a waiting list (Rosen et al, 1995; Veale et al, 1996a) and several case series (Neziroglu & Yaryura Tobias, 1993; Gomez Perez et al, 1994; Wilhelm et al, 1999). Evidence exists for the efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in the treatment of BDD (Hollander et al, 1999); this is discussed below.
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Quality of life measures found a degree of distress in BDD that is worse than that in depression (Phillips, 2000). People with the disorder are often unemployed or disadvantaged at work, housebound or socially isolated because of their handicap. A risk assessment must be done, as there is a high rate of suicide and self-harm (Veale et al, 1996b) and do-it-yourself cosmetic surgery (Veale, 2000). There is frequent comorbidity, with secondary diagnoses of depression, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder or personality disorder (Veale et al, 1996b). Not surprisingly, BDD patients are difficult to engage and treat.
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Beliefs
Patients are often dissatisfied with many areas of their body. Asking them to complete a checklist of different parts of the body, saying exactly what they believe is defective about each part, how they would like it to be and the proportion of distress that is causes can clarify their concerns. The nature of the preoccupation may fluctuate over time, which may explain why, after cosmetic surgery, a preoccupation often shifts to another area of the body.
The next step is to assess the personal meaning or the assumptions held about the perceived defect or ugliness. Patients may have difficulty in articulating the meaning, and a downward-arrow technique can usually identify such assumptions; after eliciting the most dominant emotion associated with thinking about the defect, the therapist asks what is the most shameful (or anxiety-provoking) aspect about the defect. For example, one patient might believe that having a defect affecting his nose will mean that he will end up alone and unloved. Another might believe that the most disgusting aspect of flaws in her skin is that they make her look dirty. These assumptions are then used in cognitive restructuring and behavioural experiments.
The values most important to the individual should also be identified. In BDD, appearance is almost always the dominant and idealised value and the means of defining the self. Patients implicitly view themselves as aesthetic objects. Other important values in BDD include perfectionism, symmetry and social acceptance, and they may take the form of certain rules, for example "I have to be symmetrical".
Behaviours
Mirror-gazing is at the core of BDD and it appears to be a complex series of safety behaviours. However, mirror-gazing is not even described in standard textbooks of psychopathology. Why do some BDD patients spend many hours in front of a mirror when it invariably makes them feel more distressed and self-conscious? A colleague and I recently conducted a study comparing mirror-gazing in patients with BDD and in normal controls (Veale & Riley, 2001). We concluded that patients' main motivations for mirror-gazing are: the hope that they will look different; the desire to know exactly how they look; to see how well efforts at camouflage have worked; and a belief that they will feel worse if they resist gazing (although gazing in fact increases distress). Patients were more likely to focus their attention on an internal impression or feeling (rather than on their reflection in the mirror) and on specific parts of their appearance. Although both patients and controls used the mirror for normal actions (to put on make up, shave, groom their hair or check their appearance), only patients performed mental cosmetic surgery to change their body image and practised pulling different faces. A detailed assessment of patients' behaviour in front of a mirror and their motivation is of great value for therapy and for the construction of behavioural experiments to test out beliefs. For example, the duration of the longest mirror-gazing session and the frequency of the shorter sessions can be used throughout therapy to monitor the severity of the behaviour. Other reflective surfaces, such as the back of compact disks and shop window-panes, may also be used, which distort the body image in reality.
Patients may also check their appearance by measuring their perceived defect, by feeling the contours of the skin or by taking frequent photographs or video recordings of themselves. Other behaviours include asking others to verify the existence of the defect or the effectiveness of camouflage; comparing current appearance with old photographs or with the apperance of other people; wearing make-up 24 hours a day; excessive grooming of the hair; excessive cleansing of the skin; use of facial peelers, saunas or exercises to improve facial muscle tone; beauty treatments (e.g. collagen injections to the lips); cosmetic surgery; and dermatological treatments. There may also be impulsive behaviours such as skin-picking, which produce a very brief sense of satisfaction or pleasure (similar to trichotillomania) followed by a sense of despair and anger.
Social avoidance and anxiety
Beliefs about being defective and the importance of appearance will drive varying degrees of social anxiety and avoidance. Thus, depending on the nature of their beliefs, patients will tend to avoid a range of public or social situations or intimate relationships. These should be assessed in detail and rated on a scale of 0 to 100 in terms of degree of distress or anxiety endured without any safety behaviours or alcohol. Many patients endure social situations only if they use camouflage or various safety behaviours. These are often idiosyncratic and depend on the perceived defect and cultural norms. Behaviours such as avoidance of eye contact and using long hair or excessive make-up for camouflage are obvious, but others are more subtle and are difficult to detect without quizzing the patient on behaviour in particular social situations. For example, a patient preoccupied with his nose avoided showing his profile in social situations and only stood face on to another. A patient preoccupied with perceived blemishes under her eye wore spectacles to hide the skin. Safety behaviours contribute to the inability to disprove beliefs and further checking in mirrors to see whether the camouflage is working. They must therefore be addressed so that patients can learn to enter public and social situations without them.
Most people with BDD show a slightly greater concern with their own evaluation of themselves than how others evaluate them. They therefore value both aesthetics and social acceptance. A few people with the disorder, however, are almost entirely concerned with the fear of negative evaluation by others (and not with an internal aesthetic standard). These people tend to resemble individuals with social phobia and may be easier to treat than those preoccupied with their own internal aesthetic standards. And a few are almost entirely concerned with meeting a self-judged aesthetic standard and have much less concern about social acceptance or performance. An example of this third type is a man who was preoccupied with the shape of his penis. He complained that the flesh on one side of the frenulum of the penis was flatter than on the other side. He had no concerns about his sexual performance or what his girlfriend would think if she could see that his penis was not symmetrical.
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The very nature of BDD means that a therapist will disagree with a patient's description of the problem in terms of the exact beliefs about the patient's appearance. However, both patient and therapist can usually agree on a description of the problem as a preoccupation with appearance leading to various self-defeating behaviours. It may be possible to agree initially on goals such as stopping specific behaviours (e.g. skin-picking) or entering public situations that were previously avoided. Here the implicit aim is to help the patient function and do more despite his or her appearance and aesthetic standards. However, patients often have covert goals of wanting to remain excessively camouflaged in public or of changing their appearance. I specifically ask patients not to plan cosmetic surgery or dermatological treatment during therapy and to reconsider their desire for surgery after they have recovered from BDD (or at least finished therapy). In patients who are unable to enter therapy, it is to best to put the goals to one side and to concentrate on engaging the patient in a cognitive model and later negotiate the goals. Not all patients want therapy: some may have been forced to see a psychiatrist or a therapist by a relative or cosmetic surgeon; some are too suicidal or lacking in motivation; some will accept medication, which may act as a holding operation while trying to engage the patient in a psychological treatment.
| Box 1. Assessing the suitability of a person for therapy Both patient and therapist try to agree on: A description of the problem and of the goals of therapy A formulation of the problem, i.e. an understanding of how it developed and how it is being maintained Patient and therapist should discuss: What the patient hopes the therapy will involve What the patient expects therapy to involve Whether the patient's goals are realistic The estimated number of sessions required or when the therapy is to be reviewed The frequency of sessions The expectations of homework
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The therapist next moves on to a description of a cognitive-behavioural model for BDD, showing how a person with BDD becomes excessively aware of his or her appearance and giving other examples of selective attention in everyday life. Motivational interviewing can be used to focus on the consequences of the patient's preoccupation.
The therapist then asks the patient to suspend judgement and to test out the second hypothesis for the period of therapy. Engagement is usually helped by the credibility of the clinician, who validates the patient's beliefs (e.g. "what you feel about your appearance is very understandable"), rather than discounting or trivialising them (Linehan, 1993). Having reassured the patient, the clinician must then search for and reflect on the evidence for the patient's beliefs and assumptions. The clinician might recommend that patients read about BDD (e.g. Phillips, 1996, which is written for sufferers), or meet other sufferers in a patient support group or workshop at a national conference (Obsessive Action, Aberdeen Centre, 22 Highbury Grove, London N5 2EA. Tel: 020 7226 4000). Patients are often extremely relieved and surprised to talk to other BDD patients.
Sometimes patients with BDD cannot be engaged in either CBT or pharmacotherapy on first presentation, and they undergo unnecessary surgery, beauty therapies, dermatological treatment or suicide attempts before finally accepting help from a mental health professional. Patients should be advised that there are always cosmetic surgeons, dermatologists and beauty therapists willing to treat them and that such treatments for BDD often result in dissatisfaction. Even if patients are satisfied with cosmetic treatments, often the preoccupation moves to a different area of the body, so that the handicap of the disorder remains (Veale, 2000). This is in marked contrast to patients without BDD who have undergone cosmetic surgery and who have good psychological benefits from the procedures.
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![]() View larger version (26K): [in a new window] |
Fig. 1 A cognitive-behavioural model of body dismorphic disorder.
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Once a patient is engaged in therapy and willing to test out alternatives the therapist can chose from a variety of strategies (Box 2
). Where necessary, others who are normally involved in the provision of reassurance or verification of the defect are included in a response prevention programme. They may be given instructions not to discuss requests for reassurance.
It is not possible to cover in detail here all aspects of therapy. In principle, cognitive therapy is probably more effective if it targets not the patient's beliefs about his or her appearance, but rather his or her assumptions or meaning about being defective and the importance of appearance to his or her identity. This might include collecting evidence for and against assumptions such as, "If my appearance is defective then I will be unloved and alone all my life."
Values are probably best challenged by questioning their functional cost and by reducing their importance to the self in small degrees on a continuum (using a process similar to motivational interviewing in anorexia nervosa; Treasure & Ward, 1997). A fundamental thinking error is overgeneralisation, in which the self is identified only through the external appearance (the person is an aesthetic object) and all other values and selves are diminished. In this regard, a patient may be helped by the concept of Big I and Little i: the self, or Big I, is defined by thousands of Little i's in the form of beliefs, values and characteristics since birth (Lazarus, 1977; Dryden, 1998). The patient is therefore encouraged to focus on all the characteristics of his or her self to develop a more helpful or flexible view. Reverse role-play may be used to strengthen an alternative belief: the patient practices arguing the case for an alternative new belief while the therapist argues the case for the old beliefs (Newell & Shrubb, 1994).
| Box 2. Examples of therapeutic strategies for treating body dismorphic disorder Cognitive restructuring and behavioural experiments to test out assumptions Reverse role-play of assumptions and values Exposure to social situations without safety behaviour Response prevention for compulsive behaviours such as mirror-gazing Self-monitoring, with a tally counter, for impulsive behaviours such as skin-picking Habit reversal for impulsive behaviours
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When patients reduce the amount of excessive camouflage on their face others may comment on their different appearance. This requires some preparation, as the comments about being different are likely to be distorted into being ugly.
If strategies to control mirror-gazing fail, the therapist might introduce the idea of a response cost, in which the patient agrees to pay a hated organisation a sum of money for each prolonged check in the mirror.
| Box 3. Dos and don'ts of mirror use Use mirrors at a slight distance and use ones that are large enough to show most of the body Focus attention on the reflection in the mirror rather than on how you feel Use a mirror only for an agreed function (e.g. shaving, putting on make-up) and for a limited period of time Use a variety of different mirrors and lights rather sticking to one that you trust Focus attention on the whole of your face rather than on selected areas Do not use mirrors that magnify Do not use ambiguous reflections (e.g. windows, the backs of compact disks or cutlery) Do not to use a mirror when you feel depressed: try to delay essential use until you feel happier or find other things to do until the urge to mirror-gaze has passed
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Opinions vary on treatment-resistant cases. They may require an alternative SSRI or clomipramine. Patients that remain resistant might be helped by either: (a) an SSRI in very high doses; (b) an SSRI in combination with a very low dose of an antipsychotic as an adjunct; or (c) serotonin augmentation strategies such as buspirone. As with OCD, there is probably a high risk of relapse on discontinuation of an SSRI. As yet there are no RCTs comparing CBT with an SSRI, but there is no suggestion that a combined approach is unhelpful. Indeed, maintaining a stable mood and reducing self-consciousness may have a synergistic benefit.
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D. Veale, M. Ennis, and C. Lambrou Possible Association of Body Dysmorphic Disorder With an Occupation or Education in Art and Design Am J Psychiatry, October 1, 2002; 159(10): 1788 - 1790. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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