Controversial Views On The Impact Of Plastic Surgery On Mental Health
In 2017 there was 17.5 million cosmetic procedures performed in the United States alone. Out of these millions of surgeries, the top five were all aesthetic based plastic surgery procedures. Plastic surgery is a branch of cosmetic surgery fully focused on aesthetics and reconstructing the body into a more ideal version of westernized beauty. Each year more and more surgeries, including noninvasive, are performed. While it used to only be for the rich and famous, plastic surgery is more attainable than ever for the average person.
With its growing popularity, this topic has become extremely controversial and concerns of whether or not plastic surgery is beneficial to mental health have been brought up. Those in favor of it believe that it improves self esteem by relieving patients of distress by getting rid of their “problem areas”. Those opposed believe if it is an unhealthy way to resolve body confidence issues and it promotes destructive behavior. While in some instances cosmetic surgery may be beneficial, plastic surgery focused on aesthetics is overall extremely harmful to mental health because it sets unrealistic beauty standards, causes mental illnesses, and in the long run can actually ruin self esteem.
The unrealistic beauty standards plastic surgery sets causes people to question their own perfectly valid appearance. In our modern society, people can make entire careers just for being wildly beautiful. As this generation revolves around the online world, there is no escape from seeing images of the products of plastic surgery, whether they are advertised that way or not. People become obsessed with the idea of looking like the models they see plastered all over social media. What those who think that way fail to understand is that for those models their appearance is their job. This forces them to constantly keep their looks up, meaning these stars will undergo secretly plastic surgery, leaving their fans questioning their own appearance.
Not realizing that these stars did not obtain their looks naturally, their followers constantly compare their own bodies to those that were hand crafted, wondering why they cannot look like that. This stems unhealthy thinking and pushes people to want plastic surgery when they were previously confident. This way of thinking is extremely destructive. If they were happy with their bodies before they should not feel the need to change themselves after being compared to models. The elimination of the dangerous promotion of plastic surgery without disclosing the presence of cosmetic procedures would drastically improve mental health and body confidence.
