Although these things don’t entirely cause the problem, as experts like Price acknowledge, they compound it for those personalities predisposed to eating disorders. According to the UK’s National Centre for Eating Disorders (NCED), causal factors include genetics, parents with food issues, fat-teasing, childhood abuse or neglect, childhood trauma, family relationships, having a friend with an eating disorder, and, last but not least, the ‘culture’. Particularly problematic is a culture where there is always a new diet to try, and where, according to the NCED website, ‘a vulnerable individual internalises the impossibly ideal images they see on TV or in magazines, and continually compares herself unfavourably to those images’.

The website also adds that ‘people who can admire a beautiful model but say “I could never look like her but it doesn’t bother me too much” are the people who are least likely to fall victim to problems with food’. Maybe there is a lesson for all of us here: in that disconnect between the images we see and the selves we are. We need to build a kind of immune system of the mind, where we can absorb but not get infected by the world around us.

How to be kinder to yourself about yourself

1.Think of people you have loved. Think of the deepest relationships you have ever had. Think of the joy you felt when seeing those people. Think of how that joy had nothing to do with their looks except that they looked like themselves and you were pleased to see them. Be your own friend. Be pleased to recognise the person behind your face.

2.Change your perspective of how you view photos of yourself. Every photo you look at and think, Oh, I look old, will one day be a photo you look back on and think, Oh, I looked young. Instead of feeling old from the perspective of your younger self, try feeling young from the perspective of your older self.

3.Love imperfections. Accentuate them. They are what will make you different from androids and robots. ‘If you look for perfection, you will never be content,’ says Lvov’s wife, Natalie, in Anna Karenina.

4.Don’t try to be like someone who already exists. Enjoy your difference.

5.Don’t worry when people don’t like you. Not everyone will like you. Better to be disliked for being you, than being liked for being someone else. Life isn’t a play. Don’t rehearse yourself. Be yourself.

6.Project your thoughts outwards. Think of nature. Google pictures of Amazonian glass frogs. Place yourself in the natural order. There are 9 million known species and that is estimated as 20 per cent of the animals out there. Appreciate that life is beautiful. And you are, quite literally, alive. Ignore idiots with narrow definitions of beauty. They are blind to life's imperfect wonder.

7.Never let a stranger’s negative opinion of you become your own negative opinion of you.

8.If you’re feeling bad about yourself, stay away from Instagram.

9.Remember no one else is ever worried about what your face looks like.

10.Do something somewhere in the day that isn’t work or duty or the internet. Dance. Kick a ball. Make burritos. Play some music. Play Pac-Man. Stroke a dog. Learn an instrument. Call a friend. Get into a child’s pose. Get outside. Go for a walk. Feel the wind on your face. Or lie on the floor and put your feet up against a wall and just breathe.

A note on wanting

IT IS ALL right to want something – fame, the semblance of youth, 10,000 likes, hard abs, doughnuts – but wanting is also lacking. That is what ‘want’ means. So we have to be careful of our wants and watch that they don’t cause too many holes inside us, otherwise happiness will drip through us like water through a leaky bucket. The moment we want is the moment we are dissatisfied. The more we want, the more we will drip ourselves away.

If you were already good enough what on earth would you spend your money on?

HAPPINESS IS NOT good for the economy.

We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.

Our bodies are too fat, or too thin, or too saggy.

Our skin is expected to have the right ‘sun-kissed glow’, or the right shade of lightness. Depressingly, the global skin lightening industry is a multi-billion-dollar one that is growing year by year.

This is a particularly troubling example, but this central idea of not feeling good enough is one that businesses try to exploit almost everywhere. Indeed, it can sometimes seem as though the whole purpose of marketing itself is to make us feel bad about ourselves.

For instance, listen to Robert Rosenthal, author of Optimarketing: Marketing Optimization to Electrify Your Business. Back in 2014 he wrote in Fast Company magazine that to be successful marketers need to think in terms of the benefits of the product, rather than the product’s features. Sounds innocent, enough, right?

But he adds that benefits often have a ‘psychological component’. ‘Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or FUD, is often used legitimately by businesses and organizations to make consumers stop, think, and change their behaviour. FUD is so powerful that it’s capable of nuking the competition.’

The success of the campaign is all, for the marketing gurus. The ends justify the means. Let’s not think about the wider consequences of making millions of human beings more anxious than they need to be.

But even when an advertising campaign isn’t overtly trying to conjure fear, it can still be bad for our psychology. If we are being sold the idea of cool via a pair of trousers, we subconsciously feel a pressure to obtain and maintain that coolness. And all too often, when we have spent a lot of money on a desired item, we have a sinking feeling. The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more.

We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.

Never enough

NOTHING IS EVER enough.

I have always been addicted to something. That something changes but the sense of need doesn’t.

Drink used to be my thing. I could drink and drink and drink.

When I used to work in an office block, doing a media sales job under the bleak skies of Croydon, I just dreamed of escape. The three pints I drank each night, followed by a vodka Coke, softened the blow of the evening only to harden it again when I woke up the next morning.

Some years after I broke down, I found it suddenly easy to stop drinking. And smoking. And everything. I stopped all stimulants. Even coffee and tea and Coca-Cola. I was in a state of continual panic and pain and would have done anything to take my mind off my mind but by now I knew alcohol wouldn’t work. And I thought drugs wouldn’t work. I was convinced, by then, that though they clearly worked for other people I was one of the unlucky ones for whom they wouldn’t. I was also convinced that I had once had addictive tendencies. It was more difficult to realise I still had them, but that I was now finding ‘positive’ addictions. Running, for instance, like my dad advised. Yoga. Meditation. Work. Success.

Then, years later, when I felt comparatively better I started drinking again. I wouldn’t drink every day, or even every week, but when I did drink I drank irresponsibly. The difference was that this time I could see how alcohol affected my mind. I could see the cycle that happened. I would feel a bit bad – not panic disorder bad, just a general low-level depression – and drink and feel better. Then I would feel hungover and guilty. And this feeling would linger and lower my self-esteem, which would then create more need for distraction. For drink. For eight pints and a gin cocktail. But it was dangerous. It was impossible to be a good husband or father or a good writer when you were that hungover, and the irony was that the feeling of inadequacy and self-loathing made future hangovers more likely. I have learned that however strong the craving gets the guilt afterwards will be stronger. But it’s hard. And I have immense sympathy for those who have sought to drown their relentless despair in a sea of booze. And get judged for it in the process by those who have never had that painful yearning to escape themselves.

When people talk about mental health stigma getting better they may be right about an improvement in conditions for people suffering from depression or panic attacks. They probably aren’t talking about alcoholism, or selfharm, or psychosis, or Borderline Personality Disorder, or eating disorders, or compulsive behaviours, or drug addiction. Those things can test the open minds of even the best of us. That’s the problem with mental illness. It’s easy not to judge people for having an illness; it’s a lot harder not to judge people for how the illness occasionally causes them to behave. Because people can’t see the reasons.