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Weight Stigma Tied To Lingering Depression, Anxiety After Weight-Loss Surgery
- June 5, 2025
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, June 5, 2025 (HealthDay News) — People who get weight-loss surgery experience an improvement in their mental health, but not because of the weight they lose, a new study says.
Rather, these patients face much less societal stigma over their weight, and it’s that – not the actual weight loss – that boosts their mental health, researchers reported today in the journal Health Psychology.
“The cumulative effect of stigma and discrimination actually contributes to a large part of the physical and mental health problems that we disproportionately see for patients with obesity compared to the general population,” lead researcher Larissa McGarrity, a clinical psychologist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at University of Utah Health, said in a news release.
People who faced less stigma after their surgery had healthier eating habits and better mental health, researchers found.
But patients who continued to experience stigma despite their surgery had higher risks of depression, anxiety and eating disorders, results showed.
For the study, researchers assessed the mental health and habits of nearly 150 people who underwent weight-loss surgery, both prior to and then 18 to 36 months following their procedure.
Results showed that, in general, people do tend to face less shame, blame and guilt around their body weight or shape in the years following surgery.
In fact, the reduction in stigma was striking, McGarrity said.
“The degree of change far exceeded clinically established norms in terms of what’s meaningful for a patient’s life and the impact they would notice,” she said.
That drop in stigma was linked to lower levels of anxiety, depression and eating problems like binge eating, researchers found.
However, weight loss itself wasn’t significantly associated with any improvements in these mental health problems, results showed.
This implies that other people, rather than biological factors associated with excess weight, have an enormous impact on the mental and physical health of people with obesity, researchers said.
About 40% of the patients in the study continued to experience problems with weight stigma, and those problems put them at increased risk of mental health concerns, the study said.
“The wide-ranging effects of weight stigma are one of the most important things I’m thinking about from both a research and clinical perspective,” McGarrity said.
“Weight loss is helpful for a whole lot of things, but that change in weight stigma may actually be the more powerful thing for mental health and quality of life over time,” she added.
However, researchers noted that all of the patients were treated at the University of Utah Health, and that more studies involving people from other areas should be done to confirm their results.
More information
The World Obesity Federation has more on weight stigma.
SOURCE: University of Utah, news release, May 29, 2025
