THERE is something profoundly disheartening about encountering a problem which we have known about for many years and perhaps even felt we were overcoming, only for new evidence to throw that back in our face.

Body image issues for young women have been highlighted now for a generation. There is still a comic strip in Private Eye devoted to the issue of ultra-skinny models. We even have our first female First Minister looking like a normal, healthy woman and other female political role models in Scotland who are far from stick insects.

But most of our young women do not relate to politicians. Nor do they relate to newsreaders or a host of other public figures. They relate to pop stars, reality TV figures and, above all, they relate to each other. And here, we have signally failed to make an impact on their attitudes because, quite simply, the pull and power of social media is too great.

New figures for the last four years show a steady increase in the number of girls and young women under the age of 18 being detained under the Mental Health Act in connection with eating disorders and last year the number grew by a third, prompting the description of this as an epidemic.

Dr Jane Morris is clear in linking this to the proliferation of body images on the internet and the pressures of social networking. A generation ago anorexia was a solitary misery. Now webcams, emails, Facebook and Twitter have twisted this further into a competitive activity.

She spoke of the relentless rise in body image issues over the last 20 years and said: "Nearly all of my patients are in very close Facebook, text and Instagram contact with each other. One of the ways the illness manifests is doing things like exchanging pictures of their own emaciation and competing.”

Although the internet can also be helpful in supporting recovery, all too often it amplifies the severity of the problem, boosting the numbers of young women afflicted and forcing to many of them into ordinary paediatric wards without specialist help for eating disorders, or into adult psychiatric wards.

The drive to achieve unrealistic body images, coupled with the increased sexualisation and objectification of young girls is the root cause which must be tackled through a sustained challenge to the underlying social attitudes behind these.

From playgrounds, to television soaps, to music videos and magazines, there has to be a concerted attempt to change the underlying attitudes which are fuelling this crisis. Social media, no more than the wheel, cannot be uninvented, so wider social change is the only answer.

But for those young women who do succumb the best hope, for them and for the NHS, is family based treatment, where staff train parents to deal with their child’s eating habits to help them recover at home.

There has been significant success in programmes, often utilising the pull of football, to help tackle suicidal impulses in young men. Can something similar be found to engage young women trapped into a bitter introverted cycle on body image?

This is an effort which our First Minister would be ideally-placed to spearhead, but no-one should imagine it will be easy for any politician-led initiative to overcome this extent of social problem. Perhaps we need the singer Adele to come out of her career time-out and become that role model.