How do you differentiate BDD from normal appearance concerns?

How do you differentiate BDD from normal appearance concerns?

Jamie Feusner (Psychiatrist, Professor, UCLA) gives expert video advice on: What is 'Body Dysmorphic Disorder' or 'BDD'?; What is 'body image'?; How do you know BDD is a real disorder and not just an excuse for vanity? and more...

It's not just having some concerns about appearance, because everybody has some concern about their appearance. All of us have something about our appearance that we think is not great or wish was different in some way. But Body Dysmorphic Disorder is really qualitatively different and quantitatively different than kind of every-day appearance concerns. This is something where people really spend literally hours a day, like sometimes all their waking hours, or six, eight hours a day thinking about their appearance. And they're thinking about it and believing there is something defective, when other people look at them, they can't see it at all. It looks completely normal to them. And on top of that they engage in all these behaviors to try to reduce the concern in some way or reassure themselves or change it in some way. And those behaviors themselves are very time-consuming and interfering with their functioning. So it's something really above and beyond a normal kind of appearance concern. This is really a psychiatric condition where they can't get these thoughts out of their mind and they are probably having actual perceptual disturbance in how they are seeing themselves.