Help, My Child Wants to Go to Plastic Surgeon

What to do when your own child wants plastic surgery? The German Foundation for Health Information (DSGI) recommends how parents should react and what they should look out for. Because often it is not a physical, but a psychological problem. Dysmorphophobia or also beauty hypochondria is the name for the pathological ugliness mania. People who suffer from this phenomenon, which is still little known in Germany, focus their attention on supposed defects such as thick thighs or breasts that are too small. Defects that outsiders hardly recognize, if at all.

According to the German Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy (DGKJP), the disease primarily affects young people between the ages of 14 and 20. Many of those affected see the solution to their problem in surgical intervention.

Interest in cosmetic surgery among adolescents high

According to surveys, cosmetic surgery is meeting with ever greater response in Germany. Especially also among the Dsymorphophobie endangered 14 to 20-year-olds. Exact numbers concerning the actual interferences with young people do not exist. The statistics of leading professional associations on the proportion of under 20-year-olds assume up to ten percent. However, experts advise against surgery in cases of mental illness. “In the case of dysmorphophobia, attention often shifts to another part of the body after surgery or the results are experienced as unsatisfactory,” says Prof. Dr. Albert K. Hofmann, a member of the DSGI’s scientific advisory board.

Conspicuous features such as self-imposed social isolation, listlessness, frequent looking in the mirror or hiding one’s own body in thick clothing can be symptoms. “In such a case, parents should seek intensive discussion with their children and consult a psychologist or psychotherapist,” advises Dr. Annette Kotzur, a specialist in plastic surgery and also a member of the DSGI advisory board.

Consider late effects

But it is not always a matter of dysmorphophobia when young people want to undergo cosmetic surgery. Triggers can also be actual blemishes such as protruding ears, because of which classmates triezen the child. Aesthetic plastic surgery can certainly help here. In the case of adolescents under 18 years of age, however, not without the consent of the parents. In a detailed consultation, the surgeon must first try to find out the reasons for the wish for surgery. Parents should pay just as much attention to this as to a well-founded explanation of the possible risks and long-term consequences of cosmetic surgery. “Only dubious doctors try to push their patients to an operation,” warns Heiner Kirchkamp of the DSGI.

Especially since young people are subject to special risks in aesthetic surgery. For example, scars resulting from operations grow along with the changing body. It is also important to take into account long-term aspects such as a later desire to have children, since breast surgery, for example, may affect the ability to breastfeed. “In general, surgeons as well as parents should point out that the adolescent body is still changing anyway, and any problem areas will disappear,” Hofmann says.