The secret way people with anorexia are communicating with each other.

This simple, delicate bracelet is not just a collection of red beads with a random dragonfly.

It’s an anorexia bracelet.

Women with anorexia nervosa wear them as a sign that they’re living with the illness. Putting one around your wrist is code for ‘I’m anorexic’. It’s like a friendship bracelet, but for a mental illness that has a 20% fatality rate. 

These bracelets are available on websites that promote eating disorders as a “lifestyle choice”, rather than a deadly illness. These pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’) and pro-bulimia (‘pro-mia’) sites are forums where extremely unwell people go to share share tips about staying thin and how to hide their lack of recovery.

They’re strange places, these pro-eating disorder websites. Any psychiatrist or eating disorders specialist will tell you they’re dangerous, negative places where vulnerable people encourage each other to stay sick rather than find a way to recover.

Yes, there really are people suffering from anorexia and bulimia who want to keep living that way, killing themselves slowly to be thin. And those people have stolen the symbol of the red bracelet for their own purposes. As this advertisement shows, they’re being sold as a reminder to sufferers to “‘true to your diet, and also to meet other Ana’s.”

As Julia Sonenshein writes for The Gloss, “It’s disgusting that someone decided to make money off of people who are very seriously ill and desperately need help. Pro-ED (eating disorder) sites capitalize on the loneliness and vulnerability of eating disorder sufferers, claiming to offer community but in reality driving people with EDs away from any chance at recovery. People with EDs don’t need bracelets – they need help.”

Yes, they need help.

Anyone who buys a bright red bangle promoting an illness that’s slowly taking life away from you needs help. But if they’re lurking on secretive internet forums instead of seeking help from a doctor or family member, we’re not making it easy enough for people to get the compassion they need elsewhere.

Nina Funnell, an author who has researched the pro-ana community extensively, says we need to be extremely careful in criticising the vulnerable women who visit these sites.

“We need to come at this from a place of empathy. These bracelets, and the pro-ana community, represent a desperate need to belong,” she says. “What we know about people with eating disorders is that they’re incredibly isolated, they’re misunderstood, and they feel alone. We also know that the leading cause of death among anorexics is not starvation, but suicide. Part of what drives people to suicide is a sense of isolation. So when I hear about these bracelets, I think they’re symbols of a very deep, desperate yearning to belong. We need to be very careful criticising the women who buy them, when they’re so vulnerable already.”

So, sure, let’s attack the people selling these bracelets. But our next, urgent call to action should be to understand the motivation behind buying one. We need to be listening to the customer here, not just giving air time to the manufacturer of the pro-ana bracelet.

What do you think? Are these bracelets likely to help or hurt people suffering from eating disorders?