Eating disorders are complex and serious psychological disorders that cause significant physical, mental, emotional, and social impairment. Eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of all psychiatric disorders.

In Australia, eating disorders have a lifetime prevalence of 10.5%, and an even greater proportion of Australians engage in disordered eating behaviours but do not meet the full criteria for a clinical diagnosis. However, less than a third of those living with an eating disorder receive formal treatment.

Stigma (real and perceived) and community misperceptions about eating disorders, as well as an inability to recognise or accept the seriousness of eating disorders, presents significant barriers to help seeking and early intervention.

Butterfly Foundation aims to build awareness, encourage help-seeking, and reduce stigma, while providing services and programs to support prevention, early intervention, treatment, and recovery from eating disorders.

Approach

Verian partnered with Butterfly Foundation to further understand the prevalence of lived experience of eating disorders and body image concerns within the community, and to explore community knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes about body image and eating disorders. We conducted a nationally representative survey of over 3,000 Australians. This was the second iteration of the study, enabling us to explore significant differences between 2020 and 2023.

Impact

Our work provided important insight into the prevalence of those living with or at risk of developing an eating disorder, as well as community knowledge and awareness of eating disorders and body image concerns.

The outcomes of the research informed strategic focus areas for Butterfly, including building community confidence in recognising the signs that someone is living with an eating disorder. This included the recommendation to launch an online screening tool, which can assist people with symptoms of eating disorders to seek help. This screening tool now lives on the Butterfly website and has been accessed by more than 3,000 people in less than three months.

"The 2024 Community Insights Report is a critical report which reveals people's understanding of eating disorders, prevalence rates within the community, and the impact of stigma on help-seeking.

As a result of insights and recommendations in the report, Butterfly launched an online screening tool on our website to help people to understand whether they were at risk of an eating disorder or disordered eating."

Sarah Squire, Butterfly Head of Knowledge, Research & Policy.