Roberto Olivardia, PhD

speaker

362 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 Jul

Roberto Olivardia, PhD’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Speaking of Psychology · Social media, looksmaxxing, and why men struggle with body image, with Roberto Olivardia, PhD · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

Interestingly,

Early studies, there aren't many that have looked at muscle dysmorphia in women, but some of the few out there, one in particular, found that up to 50% of the women with muscle dysmorphia reported having a sexual abuse history or rape trauma in their lives, and that they developed sort of muscle dysmorphia as a sort of defensive, protective measure in a lot of ways.

I've seen that with men as well who might have histories of trauma.

Or I've seen like with gay men, for example, who have muscle dysmorphia, who felt like they had to build their body to sort of, you know, almost protect themselves around homophobic violence that they might have experienced in their lives.

So, yeah, absolutely.

And steroid use is not just relegated to men for body image purposes.

We don't really, 100%.

It's definitely, I can tell you, it's definitely more common now than when I was looking at this 30 years ago.

And what I've seen clinically is much more frequency affecting younger ages and older ages too.

So I've seen like almost the spectrum, whereas years ago...

at least what I would see clinically, would be maybe between the ages of 17 to 30.

But I'm working with boys as young as 12 who have used anabolic steroids, who have gotten supplements from the male, who follow influencers online who are espousing such dangerous information to bodies that haven't even developed yet, I mean, from a pubertal perspective.

So it's become much more common.

And

With social media in particular, there's this whole community known as the manosphere where these sort of messaging around building your body that often have these sort of misogynistic undertones to them, promoting to young boys and men that it's their obligation to have a certain body for the express purpose of achieving dominance and power and to basically...

have um you know basically take the choice out of um you know women's hands where if you are like the perfect specimen everyone is just going to gravitate to you that's what's being fed to a lot of young men who if you're insecure as most of us are when we're teenagers and pre-teens but particularly if you might have a history of social anxiety or you're might somebody who

feels inadequate in a lot of ways.

I also specialize in ADHD and people with learning disabilities.

I see that associated a lot with this as well.

That messaging can really speak to these young men to think, okay, if this is what I need to do, because who doesn't want acceptance and who doesn't want to be respected?

Showing 121–140 of 362 · page 7 of 19