With hip New Yorkers focused on Fashion Week, including the designers setting trends and the models bringing them to life, many experts are warning that the skinny women walking runways are not only at risk for eating disorders themselves, but could cause eating disorders in the young women who admire them in magazines and on television.
 
I disagree—at least with the latter concern.  Certainly, women (and men) who make their livings by marketing their physical presence—and being acutely aware of how others are reacting to them—may be more prone than others to psychological disorders connected with self-esteem and unresolved emotional turmoil deep beneath the surface. This not only includes anorexia and bulimia, but conditions like depression, panic disorder and substance abuse. The same could be said, however, of those who gravitate toward the acting profession or any other career in which success is partly determined by the way the person looks in front of a camera.
 
I do not believe, however, that young women who see thin models in magazines or on television become eating disordered based on those images.  In order for anorexia or bulimia to take root, a woman has to have a pre-existing vulnerability of brain chemistry or a life history of emotional turmoil or both.  Seeing thin models in Vera Wang or Calvin Klein won’t distort the body image of those whose self-perception has not been made fragile, whether by complex psychological dynamics or complexities of neurochemistry.
 
For me, part of the evidence that thin models don’t spread eating disorders is that fashion designers use these women to market to all consumers, not just the ones who are razor thin.  The marketplace is still a pretty smart barometer of the American psyche and that means that, like it or not, women who are size 12 are just as likely as size 2 women to be motivated to buy clothes worn by today’s “Twiggy.”  And America is getting fatter despite our collective ideals of beauty, not slimmer. 
 
If size zero fashion models cause anorexia, why have decades of exposure to them resulted in an epidemic of obesity among young people.
 
I maintain the same position about violence in movies.  No amount of watching violent films can make otherwise healthy people turn into thugs or killers—any more than watching films about heists turns moviegoers into thieves.
 
I believe the same can even be said for advertising of alcohol and cigarettes.  The advertising itself doesn’t create addicts.  The desire to be repeatedly intoxicated by alcohol or nicotine resides in the brain chemistry or life circumstances of the users, not within the text or photographs of what is used to promote their drugs of choice. 
 
There are many powerful and toxic influences that fuel the millions and millions of cases of eating disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders and substance abuse disorders in the United States.  The most significant of those influences, however, are to be found not in the magazines we read or the television programs we watch, but in the disintegrating and traumatic relationships that unfold right in our homes.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement including www.livingthetruth.com. Dr. Ablow can be emailed at info@keithablow.com.

Clark Rockefeller, aka Christopher Chichester, aka Christian Gerhartsreiter, isn’t much of a psychological mystery. Even from afar, never having examined this human chameleon, I can tell you a good deal about him.

Rockefeller’s recent behavior is a window on the whole man, not just the most recent incarnation. When he kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter Reigh Boss from a Boston street (coercing a driver to participate in the crime, assaulting the social worker observing the visit and violating the court order that established his supervised visitation to begin with), he showed that he has no regard for society, nor for the rights or feelings of others.

Without knowing “Rockefeller’s” diagnosis specifically, this kind of self-centeredness, along with a willingness to defy the law, speaks of narcissistic and antisocial character traits. It’s that kind of combination that allows someone to lie to others again and again, experiencing no guilt or remorse.

Most of us feel bound to our life stories not only by the experiences of our lives, but by our relationships to others. Those connections, when genuine, become part of our emotional reality.

At some point, perhaps in the setting of relationships early in life that caused him terrible pain, Rockefeller broke free of these interpersonal tethers. He lost the innate debt most of us feel to the truth and reality. He was able to deceive one person after another because he was at liberty to invent and reinvent himself, in order to feed his needs, without regard to those of others.

It is no surprise that Rockefeller warmed to the acting profession. It would have been second nature to him. His whole life was an act, after all. Neither is it surprising that he would believe he could spirit his daughter away, in disguise, and hope to disappear into the heart of Baltimore. That city was just one more stage for him, and Reigh was just another actor.

No regard for the truth. No regard for the law. No concern for a mother’s panic when her daughter is kidnapped. No ability to consider that his daughter would be forever psychologically traumatized by a sudden, permanent separation from her mother.

Could such a man kill? We certainly don’t know yet whether Rockefeller will ever be an official suspect in the murders of newlyweds John and Linda Sohus. But his ability to slip the binding of his own life story, together with his willingness to steal a child from her mother and attempt to sever their bond forever, means that he may have no respect for life stories at all—not even for whether they come to a violent and premature end.

When the entire world is a stage, and when you and everyone around you are merely actors, death can be written into a script without shedding a tear. Because the show must go on.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.