FAME isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, recent research shows fame of the reality TV variety can crack you up badly.

According to a survey of 4,505 UK adults commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation, nearly one in four people (24 per cent) aged 18 to 24 report reality TV makes them anxious about their body image.

We’re talking about the tanned, hunky and muscled young males parading across our screens with their voluptuous female counterparts. Perfect skin, teeth, limbs abound – as long as you buy into the stereotype of what passes for perfection.

So what, you might say, envying and coveting another’s physical appearance is a fact of nature. It has been around since Helen of Troy and Michelangelo’s David and won’t be going away any time soon.

Yet worrying research reveals that apparently harmless sighs of envy can all too easily become cries of despair.

According to the Mental Health Foundation survey, more than one in seven (15 per cent) said they had self-harmed or deliberately hurt themselves because of fears about their body image. A disturbing 23 per cent had experienced suicidal thoughts because of insecurity about their bodies.

In addition, research published in the Lancet Psychiatry journal last week, showed self-harm has almost trebled across both sexes and all age groups since 2000. Indeed, one in five girls and young women in England aged 16 to 24 have cut, burned or poisoned themselves. Think about that. One in five.

Those are just numbers. Behind every statistic is a human being who society has a duty to nourish, protect and encourage to their full potential.

It is also clear increasing numbers of people are harming themselves as a way of managing rip-tides of anger, tension, anxiety or depression.

As Prof Louis Appleby of Manchester University, one of the authors of the Lancet report, stated: “There is a risk that self-harm will become normalised for young people, and individuals who start to self-harm when young might adopt the behaviour as a long-term coping strategy. Non-suicidal self-harm may be associated with later suicide.”

Of course, it would be absurd to blame such terrible unhappiness just on reality TV shows or social media presenting impossible images of perfection. But I do wonder if there are challenging lessons about our general culture we can learn from this mental health crisis.

Personally, I believe (to misquote Hamlet) something is rotten in the state of Britain. And that rottenness stems from the skewed values needed to keep our shallow, unsatisfying consumer culture shopping like mad.

From an early age we are taught that we are all in competition with each other and that victory will be measured by what we earn, own, look like and display. Never mind the consequences for people’s well-being, let alone for a planet being looted to produce, package and sell ephemeral consumer goods.

In such a warped system of values, what could be more natural than hating your own genetically-inherited body when it doesn’t match the ideal rewarded with fame and fortune on shows like Love Island?

Easy, too, to forget that several recent contestants from that show – for all their physical beauty and celebrity – have taken their own lives.

There are, of course, more obvious explanations for the self-harm epidemic haunting our young people.

Mental health has always been the poor relation when it comes to NHS spending, but government austerity policies since 2010 have led to disastrous underfunding.

Put bluntly, there are simply not enough mental health services available.

Add to that the stigma attached to mental illness holding people back from seeking help and it is little wonder more than half of those who self-harm do not receive any medical or psychological care.

In such a situation only the underfunding could be turned around quickly. A new government committed to expanding available treatments, rather than stealthily privatising our NHS to benefit corporate and wealthy shareholders, could develop the range of therapies available for self-harming people.

The underlying problem of ultra-competitiveness in society and inhuman representations of perfection in reality TV shows is a less straightforward problem.

Perhaps the first step is waking up to how such “reality” shows can poison our collective vision of reality.