Facing Up to Self-Hatred

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Byline: PETER PATERSON

Inside Story: Looks That Kill (BBC1); Giving Up For Good (BBC1) UNTIL a month ago, few of us, I assume, had ever heard of an illness called body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, but already it's on TV and we're told there are 400,000 sufferers in the country.

It would be comic if it weren't so tragic, for this is the psychological disorder that only recently came into the news when a Scottish surgeon - at the urgent request of the patient, and in what was judged to be in his best interests amputated the perfectly sound limb of a victim of BDD.

Thus, it was scarcely necessary for last night's Inside Story to bother explaining that BDD is a condition in which the patient hates some aspect of their body or their looks, and will severely harm themselves, even …