Reid Ewing, who stars as Dylan on the hit sitcom "Modern Family," has struggled with Body Dysmorphic Disorder his entire life, and he has now opened up about the plastic surgery addiction that it led to.
The 27-year-old actor discusses in a blog post for the Huffington Post the struggles that came with this addiction and how he regrets a lot of what he's done in the past to deal with these issues. "Body dysmorphic disorder is a mental illness in which a person obsesses over the way he or she looks. In my case, my looks were the only thing that mattered to be," he wrote of having his first surgery after becoming an actor at just 19 years old. "I genuinely believed if I had one procedure I would suddenly look like Brad Pitt."
"A disabling preoccupation with perceived defects or flaws in appearance," the Body Dysmorphic Disorder Foundation site reads about the illness. "It can affect both men and women and makes sufferers excessively self-conscious...Onlookers are frequently perplexed because they can see nothing out of the ordinary, but BDD causes devastating distress and interferes substantially with the ability to function socially."
Ewing's first procedure consisted of getting cheek implants, and things didn't go as he imaged they would have. "I woke up screaming my head off from pain, with tears streaming down my face" he wrote. "For the next two weeks, I stayed at a hotel doped up on hydrocodone. When the time came to take off my bandages, it was nothing like I had expected."
He then went on to explain how his unexpected botched results, which made the lower half of his cheeks "as hollow as a corpse's," led him to stay in complete isolation for months until the doctor finally agreed to operate on him again to try and fix what he had done. After consulting with another doctor, who had suggested a chin implant to fix the sunken-in look, he agreed to go under the knife again. "I didn't care, I just wanted out of my situation," he said of the less qualified surgeon. "He said I would be so happy with my looks it wouldn't matter to me."
Over the next several years, he continued to get procedures done as he was never pleased with the way he looked and always wanted more, until one day he realized his problem had gotten out of control and that it needed to end.
"Each procedure would cause a new problem that I would have to fix with another procedure. Anyone who has had a run-in with bad cosmetic surgery knows this is true," he continued to write. "At the beginning of 2012, all the isolation, secrecy, depression, and self-hate became too much to bear. I vowed I would never get cosmetic surgery again even though I was still deeply insecure about my looks. It took me about six months before I was comfortable with people even looking at me."
None of the surgeons who had operated on him ever saw that there was a problem and never once suggested he get a mental health screening. The addiction became a serious problem, and it took him a long time to realize just how affected by it he had become.
"My history with eating disorders and the cases of obsessive compulsive disorder in my family never came up," he added. "None of the doctors suggested I consult a psychologist for what was clearly a psychological issue rather than a cosmetic one, or warn me about the potential for addiction. People with body dysmorphic disorder often become addicted to plastic surgery...Before seeking to change your face, you should question whether it is your mind that needs fixing...I wish I could go back and undo all the surgeries. Now I can see that I was fine to begin with and didn't need the surgeries after all."
Find out how you can help those suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder here.
