Learning to live with a body dysmorphic disorder using mindfulness

Helen O’Callaghan talks to Chloe Catchpole who has learned to live with body dysmorphic disorder by using CBT and mindfulness.

WHEN Chloe Catchpole at age 15 started comparing her “quite fine” hair to her friends’ very long, thick hair and wondered if she should get hair extensions, she thought it was just normal teenage worries. Her friends said they had issues about their bodies too. “So I thought it was normal,” says Chloe, now 24 and a film journalist.

And yet the comparisons were getting obsessive. If they went out for the day and took pictures, she’d look at them online that evening and compare herself to the other girls. “I’d be thinking of things I could do to make myself more like them— things like my hair and my weight. I was picking myself apart, trying to model myself into how my friends looked.”