What Is Height Dysphoria? Causes and Effective Treatments

Height dysphoria is something that every limb lengthening surgery candidate may experience before they come and decide to have the surgery. Before we explain in detail what height dysphoria is, we would like to explain body dysmorphia in general. Body dysmorphia or Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a serious psychological condition where the person spends too much time in their heads worrying about how they look. Nowadays, everyone is somewhat worried about how they look and try to appear their best. Cosmetic surgeries especially help most people to look and feel their best; however, body dysmorphia is a mental health issue and it should be detected by a psychologist and the patient should get psychotherapy sessions for the treatment of the condition. 

These are the symptoms of body dysmorphia:

1. Constantly checking themselves in the mirror and trying to change how they look, fix their clothes, hair, etc.
2. Or, avoiding mirrors altogether not to see themselves in it because they may feel shame, disgust, anger about how they look
3. Constantly comparing their appearance with others’
4. Constantly exercising and grooming

What is the Difference between Body Dysmorphia and Height Dysphoria?

Firstly, let us explain what height dysphoria is. Most people complain about how they feel short-heighted, and there are also people who think they are too tall and experience problems in their daily life due to height-related problems. These cases of dissatisfaction about one’s height can be summarized as one term: height dysphoria.

Height dysphoria is a type of body image anxiety disorder, where the affected person feels anxious, nervous, sad or dissatisfied due to the fact that they feel their height is short/tall. In many cases, these people compare their height to others’ height: to the height of a person (usually a celebrity) they admire, or to the height of the people in environments they spend time. Usually, the body image that these people have about their height do not reflect how others perceive them because they see their height as a flaw and exaggerate its important in their heads.

Also, there are people with height dysphoria who want to become taller in order to achieve what they cannot get with their current height: becoming a basketball player, getting qualified for a job with strict height requirements, pave their way to a successful career, or impress women and make it easier to find a partner. Nevertheless, there are still a number of people who just want to be taller or have a certain height, x cm or x inches, independently from what people think about their height or how they look compared to other people around them. They have their own perception of how their body should look and don’t feel comfortable with their current body height.

The difference between height dysphoria and body dysmorphia is height dysphoria is only focused on one’s height while body dysmorphia is a general body image disorder that may be focused on the whole body or some certain body parts.

How to deal with Height Dysphoria?

If you feel dissatisfied about your height, and this dissatisfaction is not something you feel every once in a while and can live with it, but that has become more of an obsession and makes you feel depressed, then you may have this condition named height dysphoria. To deal with your body image issues, the first thing you can do is to arrange a meeting with a psychologist, who will help to re-evaluate your perception of height and look at the ways of improving your life quality from a different point of view.

This image is from one of our psychological counselling sessions with our patient

In case nothing helps, and there is nothing you can do to accept your height the way it is, there is one last resort that may help. This last resort is limb lengthening surgery or limb reduction surgery. Of course it is a serious decision to make. Limb lengthening and limb shortening surgeries are not cheap for most budgets. It takes up to 1-1.5 year to achieve height gain plus fully recover from the procedure.

As in any other surgery, height increase and height decrease surgeries also contain some possible risks and complications; however, our doctor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yunus Öç has a very low complication rate and as the WannaBeTaller team, we will be with you through the whole process. We also offer our every patient psychological consultation service both before the surgery and during the lengthening/height decrease process. Please feel free to contact our patient consultants to get free consultation service and to get more information about limb lengthening or limb reduction surgery.