Rates of anorexia had been steadily climbing since the 1950s, but it was not until the death of the singer Karen Carpenter in 1983 that the disorder became a household word. She died from heart failure resulting from anorexia nervosa, and all of a sudden newspaper stories and after-school TV specials began to feature teenage girls “dying to be thin”. Besides highlighting the spectacle of a healthy, attractive young girl’s determination to starve herself, the storylines usually focused on the family dysfunction that psychologists believed lay at the heart of the disorder. Parents were told not to be the food police, that anorexia was a misguided search for control. Only when they let their child be fully in control of their own life would the anorexia be resolved.