Romanticising ‘sickness' dooms us to a national cycle of dysfunction
A young, attractive woman with tousled hair called Danielle – username Big Sister – is talking with fetching authenticity at the camera under a caption that reads: 'What it's like living with high-functioning ADHD.'
Rubbing her eyes briefly and regularly, presumably to indicate the scatty but approachable nature of her disorder, this self-described life coach says: 'I got diagnosed with ADHD in my late 20s [so] I lived a huge amount of my life thinking that things were normal when they were in fact not.' She then goes on to describe the amazement of the realisation that not everyone has 'thoughts... all the time'. A 3-D 'orb' appears with different-sized globules lit up to show her best approximation of how her ADHD-diagnosed 'not normal' brain works.
This is truly bizarre to watch. What this young woman with her perfect brows and confident gaze in front of the camera is describing is the utterly unremarkable fact of being a conscious human being – and one so privileged that she can devote herself to gushing about her orb-shaped brain to strangers on the internet. Yet this video has been viewed 2.2 million times and liked by 174,000 people.
In a little over a decade, illness and suffering have gone from being a negative whose inconvenience the average person tried to manage and overcome as privately as possible, to the centrepiece of a person's identity.
Sickness has become a power tool, a game piece to play, and a shield: once you declare your badge of honour in the form of a diagnosis of ADHD or PMT, it's open sesame. Nobody can counter you because of… neurodiversity or hormones or whatever it may be. No wonder the staggering rates of sickness benefits claimed by young people are breaking Britain's finances.
Somehow, as woke ideology has marched across internet users' consciousness, phrases like 'my trauma' have become utterly commonplace, obscuring, as so many of these overused labels do, the serious traumas of people who have experienced genuinely terrible things, from wars and domestic abuse to the terror and despair of being stalked by a mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Because the seriousness of some mental states has been lost amid all this froth, emotional wellbeing is packaged up as information to share before communication is to take place. I was struck by an advert for the 'I'm OK' bee enamel brooch by the artist Gary Floyd, which encapsulates 'the often unexpressed sentiment that many individuals face when asked about their emotional wellbeing… It's OK not to be OK sometimes.' Really? Who knew?
Experts now worry that amid all this reaching for the I'm Not OK button, TikTok's myriad of 'neurodiversity' influencers encourages people who might be looking for meaning, identity, a place to hang their anxiety and, of course, a bulletproof get-out-‑of-jail-free card to self-diagnose with a disorder.
This is worrying for many reasons, including that in their pure form, such disorders need to be taken seriously with specialist treatment, not just deployed for sympathy points. The case of ADHD is one of the most prominently pushed online, romanticised and rendered 'cute'.
Researchers carried out a study with 2,843 undergraduate psychology students on how they perceived the videos. This showed that 'people who watched a large number of ADHD-related TikToks also tended to overestimate ADHD's prevalence by as much as 10 times and think more negatively about their own symptoms'. Scientists expressed concern that the videos – which have had more than half a billion views combined – portray ADHD (and other disorders, such as mild autism) as 'lively, loveable and almost entertaining'.
It's great that the shame, isolation and misery that so often accompanied both mental problems and sensitive (usually women's) physical issues in the past has been replaced by a culture of support and a standard of compassionate treatment.
But it hasn't stopped there. Because of the way the umbrella ideology of 'diversity' has spread and embedded itself, there is a pervasive belief that pathology is power. Diversity, after all, is about making sure marginalised groups are not 'under-represented' (a spurious term if ever there was one). What this translates to is giving anyone who isn't 'privileged' – namely straight, white, non-trans people – priority in all things so as to stamp down any 'systemic' phobias and 'isms'.
Translated into the domain of health, it's obvious where this is going. Just as prioritising tick-box criteria – skin colour, sexual orientation and so on – has been devastating for the quality of education, politics and cultural life, so the celebration of pathology and the zest for auto-diagnosis that it invites is decimating the ability to even interact with other people.
When members of a society are incentivised to cry sickness – an unanswerable claim to being 'marginal' too – it becomes impossible to rely on anything operating properly, from the legal system and businesses to hospitals and family gatherings.
Because if everyone and everything can be stopped in their tracks by someone's pain, trauma, disorder or negative feelings – lest the latter be railroaded and the person further traumatised and 'unheard' – then nothing can work, no matter how important. Friends can't speak freely with each other. Plans can be cancelled at short notice for any excuse because 'my pathology made me'.
This is vexing enough on the personal level, but writ large over the country as a whole, it is devastating our economy and our spirit. But as Britain groans, the TikTokers are laughing all the way to the bank.
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