Swedish Modeling Agencies Recruiting Anorexia Patients Outside Clinic?

Modeling agencies in Sweden are being accused of looking for new talent in the young female patients outside the largest anorexia clinic in Stockholm, the country's capital.

"We find this absolutely reprehensible. They have been standing outside our clinic and trying to pick up our girls because they know that they are skinny," Anna-Maria af Sandeberg, chief doctor at the Stockholm Center for Eating Disorders, was quoted saying by the newspaper Metro.

Many of the patients allegedly approached by modeling scouts are 14- and 15-year-old girls, noted Sandeberg, who added the scouting activity has become so prevalent, the clinic, which reportedly treats about 1,700 patients, has had to change its policy that let patients undergoing treatment walk outside the building.

One of the girls approached by modeling scouts was apparently so ill, she was in a wheelchair.

Sandeberg said some of the women approached by the scouts had a body mass index as low as 14, while the typical BMI for a "healthy" adult woman is between 18.5 and 24.9.

She described the alleged model recruiting tactics as "repugnant...It sends the wrong signals when the girls are being treated for eating disorders."

Said Christina Lillman-Ringborg, the clinic's care coordinator: "Part of the disease is that you have a distorted body image, and you get a sudden flattery and a job offer. It does not facilitate the treatment of the disease."

Lillman-Ringborg was quoted by another media outlet, TT, Sweden's leading news company, that the modeling agencies claim they only approach "healthy, normally slim young people and that they never urge anyone to lose weight. That's how they defended themselves."

Following her dismissal last year as the editor of Vogue Australia, Kirstie Clements, who worked with the magazine for 25 years, released a tell-all book called "The Vogue Factor," an insider's view of the fashion media industry that claimed, among other things, fashion models regularly starve themselves to stay thin --- some even eating tissue paper to feel full.

The Stockholm Center has so far declined from naming the accused modeling agencies, but the news elicited a response from Elite, one of the world's top modeling organizations.

Fredo Kazemi, director of Elite's Stockholm board, asserted such scouting tactics would be "disgusting and unethical. I do not think that any large, serous agencies would work in this way," TT reported him saying.