With so many other elements of her public life, Diana's confession to bulimia was perfectly on target with culture at large. Eating disorders have been completely outed. Talk shows are populated with former anorexics, magazines routinely run cautionary tales, books offer up every moment of agony.. everyone is coming clean.

 Normally when something is demystified like this, the problem is halfway to being overcome by public information and exposure. After all, in the modern world, information is power.

 But an odd and dangerous glitch occurs when this philosophy is applied to eating disorders: all the attention serves to normalise and ultimately romanticise eating disorders.

"Eating disorders are glamorised in ways that other mental illnesses aren't," says Traci Mann, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA who studied the effectiveness of an eating disorder prevention program. "People don't say, I wish I could be schizophrenic for three months. I want to be anorexic for three months should sound as ridiculous as that, but it doesn't."

 The picture that many have of eating disorders, says Mann, is of a behaviour that is just slightly beyond the norm, that makes you thin, and can be recovered from at will.

 Mann looked at a college program run by recovered anorexics and bulimics. She found that participants, far from being deterred, reported more disordered eating after the presentations. "My guess," she says, "is that speakers who were poised, attractive and self-assured, somehow made eating disorders look like a worthwhile risk - you'd have a bad few months but afterwards, you'd be thin."

 A similar message comes across in the media, says Kristen Harrison PhD, assistant professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.

"Even on talk shows," she says, "anorexics are presented as these perfectionist girls who've managed to do what the rest of the world wants to do. To some young women, this looks like a great way to get attention and be the ultimate female - superpure, good, disciplined, but also frail and in need of care."

 P erhaps the media messages about eating simply need a different target: the disordered ideal, unrealistic thinness - rather than the disordered behaviour.