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Reid Ewing Reveals Struggle with Body Dysmorphia

Known mostly for his role as Dylan in ABC’s Modern Family, actor Reid Ewing, 27, wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post about his struggles with body dysmorphia and years of plastic surgery.

“Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental illness in which a person obsesses over the way he or she looks. In my case, my looks were the only thing that mattered to me. I had just moved to LA to become an actor and had very few, if any, friends. I’d sit alone in my apartment and take pictures of myself from every angle, analyzing every feature.”

Some dark s**t. And hard to understand for a lot of people when they look at Ewing, who’s a classically good-looking dude and definitely has been his whole life.

He went to one doctor and together they decided that cheek implants would help him achieve his goal of looking like Brad Pitt…or just not like Reid Ewing. After the surgery he spent two weeks living in a hotel, healing. When the bandages were removed he was shocked, the surgery had made his cheeks look sunken.

“I went back to the doctor several times in a frenzy, but he kept refusing to operate on me for another six months, saying I would eventually get used to the change. I couldn’t let anyone see me like this, so I stayed in complete isolation. When I went out, people on the street would stare at me, and when I visited my parents they thought I had contracted some illness.”

He eventually went to a different doctor to fix that surgery, and over the course of several years he went back again and again to have surgeries to fix previous surgeries and then surgeries to fix those surgeries. By the time he was shooting Modern Family he says that he had had the implants removed and was doing slightly less invasive procedures like injectable fillers and fat transfers.

This was particularly disturbing,

“Of the four doctors who worked on me, not one had mental health screenings in place for their patients, except for asking if I had a history of depression, which I said I did, and that was that. My history with eating disorders and the cases of obsessive compulsive disorder in my family never came up. None of the doctors suggested I consult a psychologist for what was clearly a psychological issue rather than a cosmetic one or warn me about the potential for addiction.”

That’s so bad. This was a really brave thing for him to do, as a handsome guy but also as an actor. Reactions to this are probably similar to the consensus when a beautiful, happy girl commits suicide, everyone’s like, “They’re life is perfect what’s going on that would make them unhappy?!” just because they’re attractive. And body s**t doesn’t just apply to women, there are expectations for men to and it’s important to know that men are out there struggling with eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

Ewing wraps things up nicely,

“Plastic surgery is not always a bad thing. It often helps people who actually need it for serious cases, but it’s a horrible hobby, and it will eat away at you until you have lost all self-esteem and joy. I wish I could go back and undo all the surgeries. Now I can see that I was fine to begin with and didn’t need the surgeries after all.”

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