Embedded tracking tool revealed details of users’ visits to content on depression, self-harm and eating disorders

Some of Britain’s biggest charities providing support for people with mental health problems shared details of sensitive web browsing with Facebook for use in its targeted advertising system.

The data was sent via a tracking tool embedded in the charities’ websites and included details of webpages a user visited and buttons they clicked across content linked to depression, self-harm and eating disorders.

Jessica Hausner’s film, which avoids spelling out its obvious subject, focuses on a group of schoolgirls encouraged to live without food

Jessica Hausner is the Austrian director whose elegant, refrigerated style has made her a Cannes favourite and her 2009 film Lourdes, about the ordinary world of miracles, is a 21st-century classic. But her recent move to English-language movies has resulted in some nebulous work in the shape of her 2019 picture Little Joe, and so it has proved again with this exasperating and baffling movie.

Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption. The “trigger warning” at the beginning of the film about these issues is fatuous, whether intended ironically or not. The deadpan mannerisms are glib, the line readings are torpid in the wrong way and the laborious drama leads us round and round and round like an Escher staircase. But it is certainly well shot by Martin Gschlacht and punctiliously designed by Beck Rainford.

This searing memoir from a recovered anorexic, which explores the warped thinking around the illness, should be required reading

There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is (she was, until recently, a staff writer on the Guardian and, for almost a decade, its fashion correspondent). Anorexics tend to be unreliable witnesses when in the grip of the illness and, at times, there is an oddity about this book, a curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but Freeman is a brave, illuminating and meticulous reporter and uses her experience wisely. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, hospital admissions for eating disorders have increased by 84% over the past five years, a fact that in itself should make this revelatory book required reading.

Freeman explores the anorexic’s warped thinking and brings us as close as is possible to understanding the incomprehensible – the consuming obsession with not consuming. It was a casual comment that ignited her illness. It often is, apparently. A skinny girl said to her: “I wish I was normal like you.” “Normal” triggered what would become her abnormal struggle (a “trigger”, she points out, is not the same as a “cause”). She grew up in a Jewish-American family – loving, comfortably off – and came to England from New York, aged 11. At home, she believes she absorbed the subtext that “food was the medium through which women express unhappiness”. She debunks the oversimplification that anorexia is caused by the fashion industry’s insistence on skeletal models, but emphasises that “the association between female self-denial and perfect femininity is entrenched in our culture. This doesn’t cause anorexia, but it gives it a fertile ground in which to breed.” She investigates new theories about the illness, including its possible connections with autism, OCD and metabolic rate. The book is garnished with expert opinion from doctors, psychiatrists and co-anorexics encountered in hospital, with whom she has been back in touch. Her tendency is to challenge reflex opinion and never to make the mistake of claiming to know more than is known. For whatever you thought you knew, the truth about anorexia is always more complicated. One of her most unnerving assertions is that anorexia is “not a desire to be thin – it is a desire to look ill”.

The journalist and former in-patient offers a clear-eyed view of a debilitating and misunderstood illness

Hadley Freeman was 14 when a seemingly innocuous comment blew her life apart. Three years earlier her family had relocated from New York to London, and she enjoyed the special status that being American conferred on her among her British peers. But she struggled to find her place among teenage girls who were embracing bras and boys – “The grown-up world was pressing in, monsters making the door bulge inwards while I frantically tried to push it back.”

On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, next to a girl named Lizzie. Noting Lizzie’s skinny legs, and her own “matronly trunks”, she asked Lizzie if it was hard to find clothes when you’re small. “Yeah,” she replied. “I wish I was normal like you.” At this, Freeman writes, “a black tunnel yawned open inside me, and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’ – ‘normal’. Normal was average. Normal was boring. Normal was nothing.”