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I re-read my teenage diaries hoping for a dose of nostalgia – instead I was horrified

Lust, cruelty and a desperate need for attention ... I thought my old journals would bring back warm memories – in reality they were a document of the unique misery and painful insecurities of adolescence

I own nine of the most devastatingly embarrassing books ever written. They might be the only books that attempt to algebraically prove the existence of God 14 pages after the words, “I don’t want to touch his penis.” Actually, that’s probably not true – the books are my teenage diaries, and there’s nothing unique about the humiliating and exhilarating experience of being a 14-year-old girl.

If there’s one thing in the world I never want to be again and wish I never had to be in the first place, it’s a teenage swot with PE in the morning. When I ask female friends if they think being a teen was uniquely awful, one replies “uniquely awful and uniquely special” – but I don’t think that is something I ever felt. I love to see the magic of girlhood represented in coming-of-age movies such as Lady Bird and Booksmart, but I look back at my own adolescent self and see a floundering fish who hurt and was hurt with little meaning or beauty.

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UK mental health charities handed sensitive data to Facebook for targeted ads

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.

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US eating disorder helpline takes down AI chatbot over harmful advice

National Eating Disorder Association has also been under criticism for firing four employees in March who formed a union

The National Eating Disorder Association (Neda) has taken down an artificial intelligence chatbot, “Tessa”, after reports that the chatbot was providing harmful advice.

Neda has been under criticism over the last few months after it fired four employees in March who worked for its helpline and had formed a union. The helpline allowed people to call, text or message volunteers who offered support and resources to those concerned about an eating disorder.

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Club Zero review – not much to chew on in this baffling non-satire

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.

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Susie Orbach: ‘Body uniformity is out of control – there’s no right way to have labia!’

The psychotherapist on body hatred, what’s changed since she wrote Fat Is a Feminist Issue – and the smell of her clients

Susie Orbach’s first book, Fat Is a Feminist Issue, a pioneering exploration of women’s relationship with eating and body image, became an instant classic when it was published in 1978. Orbach is one of the world’s best-known psychotherapists, lecturing internationally, advising organisations ranging from the NHS to the World Bank, and helping patients who have included Diana, Princess of Wales. The daughter of an American teacher and a Labour MP, Orbach grew up in London, where she still lives and works.

What do you remember about writing Fat Is a Feminist Issue?
It came out of youth – I was 29 and I wouldn’t know how to write that way any more. I would have written it as a pamphlet but Joe, my then husband, said don’t be ridiculous, you need to write it as a book. It took just six months. I remember Penguin turned it down at the time so it went to Paddington Press and they tried to change the title on me.

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Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman – review

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”.

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I’m sure my friend has an eating disorder. Should I try to talk to her about it? | Ask Annalisa Barbieri

I understand your urge to help but, as you say, the fact that you don’t bring it up could be what makes you a valued friend

Over the years, my best friend and I have shared the highs and lows of motherhood, career and family. As we get older, however, it troubles me that we have never discussed her well-hidden eating disorder.

When I found out she had disordered eating (it took me years to realise, as she is very clever), I decided to wait until she was ready to talk. But now, a decade on, I think it unlikely that this conversation will ever happen. There was one opportunity recently, when she had to have some teeth re-veneered, and said breezily, “I wonder why that had to happen?”, but I was too slow to seize it and ask a question.

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Good Girls by Hadley Freeman review – anorexia from within

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.”

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‘I worry my young patients will die’: UK’s eating disorder services not fit, say GPs

Exclusive: doctors surveyed say young people forced to endure long waits as NHS services overwhelmed

Young people with eating disorders are coming to harm and ending up in A&E because they are being denied care and forced to endure long waits for treatment, GPs have revealed.

NHS eating disorders services are so overwhelmed by a post-Covid surge in problems such as anorexia that they are telling under-19s to rely on charities, their parents or self-help instead.

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Unregulated ‘eating disorder coaches’ putting people at risk, say experts

Exclusive: inadequately qualified coaches charging thousands claiming to offer support to people with eating disorders

Vulnerable mental health patients are being put at risk by unregulated “eating disorder coaches” who do not have the necessary qualifications, experts have said.

As demand for eating disorder support soars – hospital admissions for eating disorders increased by 84% in the last five years – more people are filling gaps in NHS care.

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