By Ivelisse Estrada

Heather Locklear came to Fiji in 1995. Or, rather, her Melrose Place character, Amanda Woodward, did, when television finally arrived on the island for the first time.

Anne E. Becker ’83, MD ’90, PhD ’90, SM ’05, RI ’09, a psychiatrist, anthropologist, and eating disorders expert who had been fascinated by Fiji since a research stint there as an undergraduate, recognized the research potential in such an arrival—in seeing how a media-naïve population would respond to broadcasts from the West.

Becker had already done ethnographic research in Fiji several times, studying postpartum depression, how women work collaboratively, and body image. “You can study anthropology, you can study theory, you can study methods, but nothing really prepares you for the deep affective ties you have when you become part of a community as part of understanding it,” she says.

As part of the Fijian community, Becker was struck by the amount of attention given to eating and the forthrightness with which people would discuss others’ bodies, including her own. “As a Westerner,” she says, “you presume that there’s a one-to-one relationship between the self and the body—that the way you present your body is a pretty good representation of your values. Those presumptions don’t apply in Fiji.”

Becker learned that Fijians didn’t cultivate their bodies to enhance their status, as a Westerner might. She believed this cultural inclination would persist even after the arrival of television. So she set up a study in which two groups of girls—same school, same ages—would be studied: one group before television, in 1995, and one group after, in 1998.

The data and personal interviews yielded stunning results. Rather than exhibit the resilience that Becker had anticipated, the girls were completely seduced by the lifestyles portrayed in television dramas like Melrose Place, and they wanted to be Amanda Woodward. “They had this very pragmatic but misguided collective idea that maybe, if they could emulate these actresses, they could aspire to lives that were similar,” she says. To deal with what Becker deemed a collective demoralization, in which the girls perceived themselves as “slow, poor, dark, and fat,” they turned to disordered eating—in a culture that had never before exhibited such behavior.

Curious about further implications of this accelerated cultural change, Becker decided to expand the parameters of her study. She and her team first conducted a focus study with parents to gauge their reactions; then Becker got funding to extend their previous findings in an epidemiological study.

Adapting a World Health Organization questionnaire about health risk behaviors in teenagers, Becker broadened the health outcomes of the original study beyond eating disorders. Ultimately, she and her team hoped to understand the effects of rapid assimilation.

The all-encompassing WHO questionnaire asked these teenaged Fijian girls about everything from homework to violence, including suicidal behavior. Again, the findings were surprising: Nearly 25 percent of the 523 girls in their study had thought about suicide within a year before their participation—another behavior that had never before been observed in Fijian girls. “But they hadn’t connected the dots between what had been so intolerable about their situations and the despair they’d been feeling,” Becker says. “So how could they protect themselves from future suicidal thoughts?”

At Radcliffe, Becker—who is the Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow this year—is unpacking the statistical and narrative data from the study to write a book titled “Navigating Body, Self, and Society Across Adolescence: A Mental Health Crisis in Fiji.”

But Becker believes her findings will have implications beyond Fiji. “Fiji is probably one example of many in which rapid assimilation is having a devastating impact on teenagers,” she says. “This population isn’t usually targeted for health interventions—people are more worried about the under-five kids and chronic and infectious diseases. Teenagers fall off the radar: They don’t ask for help or they don’t want help—but they absolutely need it.”

Photos courtesy of Anne Becker