Well, that last paragraph is a pile of bullsht.
People don’t get well because they’ve got no other option. They die.
If the writer thinks that we are going to shake people out of whatever it is the writer thinks they need shaking out of, there has to be a better way than the withdrawal of support which every single genuine person suffering a long-term issue deserves, and often needs.
It has only just been recognised by the NHS that the previously popular advice for sufferers of ME/CFS that improvement can be sought through exercise and fresh air, et cetera, is not only untrue for a large cohort of sufferers, but – for some – could be actively catastrophic.
Not only that, but especially post Covid , that it may be a neurological or autoimmune condition , especially given post Covid infection uptick in conditions such as MS, and Parkinson’s.
It is well written. But the erudition of its author does not provide adequate cover for the fact that author is relying on many hackneyed old tropes, and a few new ones – especially regarding young women – for good measure.
And that is deliberate. The author knows damn well that it is.
Finally, the swelling of numbers amongst the disabled is not unattached from the rise in the pension age to 67.
This was inevitable. This was predicted.
If it is hard for somebody completely able-bodied to gain employment after the age of 55, imagine how much harder it is for someone whose body is simply responding to age, with even minor disabilities preventing them finding work?
It is already difficult enough for people who have spent their lifelong employment activity in physical occupations, without asking them to retrain in jobs where employers only wish to recruit much younger people, often preferring graduates, even for entry-level jobs.
So on top of physical disability – which might, like I said, be minor – we are now loading onto a whole generation of people a sense of hopelessness and economic anxiety.
No wonder people are suffering mental health disabilities also at an alarming rate.
I’m not going to pick it apart anymore. It is a well written, seemingly sympathetic, seemingly well researched, hatchet job.
It is rage bait with extra syllables.
***** Nota bene.. I am not saying there isn’t a cohort of people who have made having issues an identity.
But it is very difficult to discern whether or not this is purely down to choosing an identity, or– by gathering together with people similar in age and with similar, GENUINE, issues- young people are simply doing what young people have always done, creating comfort in the forming of little tribes.
Nevertheless, I stand with my analysis, that this is deliberately written to steer the reader towards an ever growing populist conclusion, that disability has been chosen as an identity.
Rather than a life changing, and sometimes life limiting, reality.
————————-——————————————
From the Telegraph
Fair use and Fair dealings apply
Copyright remains with the Daily Telegraph
#sickinfluencers
“This is a disaster for disabled people.
‘Perhaps you’ve seen it on a news segment on television about a transgender rights march, where every other attendee appears to be supported by a walking stick. Or perhaps you’ve heard about it in your family WhatsApp group, when your sister tells you about your seemingly healthy niece’s new condition. If you still haven’t noticed it, your daughter surely can’t have escaped the bravely smiling young women on Instagram, their profiles decked out in acronyms.
POTS. ME. CF. ADHD. MDD. GAD. PMDD. EDS. FND. For a steadily growing group of British young women, these acronyms – and the conditions they represent – are fundamental to their lives. The country is sicker than it’s ever been before, and it’s not afraid of shouting about it. Disability is changing. To many, it is no longer an adversity to overcome, but a social identity akin to one’s sexuality, gender, or race; an immutable reality to be celebrated by the subject and accommodated by the rest of us.
One in four British people is now disabled, according to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Family Resources Survey. To put this figure in context, this is a higher rate of disability than witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The growth in those identifying as disabled does not reflect a sudden, shocking increase in the number of paraplegics. The twin driving factors are, instead: mental health disorders and chronic conditions. They can be hard to “prove” and harder to effectively treat, and are more likely to be experienced by young women.
A cohort of young people – somewhat cruelly dubbed “sickfluencers” – want to tell you about their conditions and convince you they are real. Like the rest of my generation, they broadcast their struggles to an online community of like-minded individuals. But, were they not decked out in the accessories of their disease, it would be impossible to perceive the conditions they consider to be so central to their interaction with the world.
‘Hi, life update: I have a chronic illness!’
Take Pots, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a diagnosis that has exploded in recent years. Type the acronym into Instagram and you’ll be bombarded with artfully curated pastel info-graphics (“Seven symptoms I didn’t realise were Pots”), beautiful women with slicked-back hair sharing their Pots journey (“hi life update: I have a chronic illness!”), pink wheelchairs and walking sticks, compression socks embroidered with flowers and bold messages against medical misogyny (“Doctors were wrong about endometriosis. They’re wrong about Pots”).
Many of those who have given themselves a diagnosis of Pots have been met with scepticism when they’ve subsequently discussed their symptoms – and preferred label – with medics. The charity Pots UK warns those who think they might have the condition that “many healthcare professionals do not know that Pots exists and so may not think of the diagnosis” and advises: “If you think you may have this condition, it may help to take a printout of information from this website to your appointment”.
The fear of not being taken seriously by doctors has led people with Pots, who almost always happen to be women (a US study found that 85 per cent of Pots patients were female), to seek validation from their online community. One woman started sharing her story on Instagram partly for this reason, saying that “every comment or DM [direct message] I get about how I helped someone get diagnosed, feel less alone, or learn more about their illness makes it all worth it”.
This community provides a vital function to those who believe medical practitioners are failing to understand their complex conditions. On another Instagram account, a user wrote: “As a young woman, I sometimes felt I had to prove I knew my own body. Eventually, I felt as if the only people I could completely trust were myself and other women online who were experiencing the same things.”. Poor experiences with doctors meant she developed “health anxiety and OCD”.
For the majority of chronic-illness content creators, their accounts appear designed to act as mutual-aid networks. But not everyone is so selfless. I have seen dozens of accounts with links to healthcare products – compression socks, dubious supplements – on which the Instagrammer makes a commission for each sale. Some adverts are undisclosed. Other users advertise themselves as doctors, and sell boutique “diagnosis services” over the internet – despite not having the correct medical qualifications to do so. One popular “doctor” targeting Pots sufferers turned out to be, in reality, a “trained naturopath and yoga teacher”. Turning away from the medical establishment opens a door to all forms of modern-day quackery.
Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan, a neurologist and author of The Age of Diagnosis, says Pots was first named as a condition in 1993 to help explain why some fainting episodes in young people persisted into later life. The condition manifests through palpitations, dizziness, and a rapid increase in heart rate upon standing (with the arbitrary medical benchmark for diagnosis placed at 30 beats-per-minute faster compared to sitting). In the UK, 130,000 people are believed to be affected, with this number likely to be an underestimate given that it was calculated before the pandemic.
There is no doubt that many of those diagnosed with Pots have genuine illnesses that have a significant effect on their lives. Ella Mills, the 35-year-old founder of the food and wellness company Deliciously Ella, has suffered debilitating symptoms such as chronic fatigue, digestive problems and pain “everywhere” from the age of 21.
This week, Dr Lesley Kavi, a former GP and chair of Pots UK, said that cases have significantly increased since the pandemic, but “half of patients are told that their symptoms are all in their head”. She added: “When they describe so many symptoms at one time, and the doctors don’t think to test for Pots, they assume the problem is psychological.”
But, says O’Sullivan, there is no “demonstrable pathology or proof of a nervous system disorder. There is no pathology to prove a diagnosis”. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the rising number of women identifying as having Pots – with its relatable list of symptoms – is a prime example of what some doctors worry is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Dr Katie Musgrave, a general practitioner, has seen this phenomenon first-hand. She describes a “hyper-awareness of physical symptoms like fatigue and a racing heart” from patients who visit her seeking an explanation for their pain, with an expectation that there will be a single, incontrovertible diagnosis. Often though, she says, it is more likely that factors such as “a lack of sleep and exercise and a poor diet” are causing the patient’s symptoms, and these can be resolved with minimal medical intervention.
Some women, however, do not accept such a verdict. Invariably, these individuals have already decided they have a certain condition before they see a doctor, and if the GP refuses to validate their beliefs, they “seek out a private specialist and get a diagnosis of an unusual condition,” says Musgrave.
But, says O’Sullivan, there is no “demonstrable pathology or proof of a nervous system disorder. There is no pathology to prove a diagnosis”. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the rising number of women identifying as having Pots – with its relatable list of symptoms – is a prime example of what some doctors worry is an epidemic of overdiagnosis.
Dr Katie Musgrave, a general practitioner, has seen this phenomenon first-hand. She describes a “hyper-awareness of physical symptoms like fatigue and a racing heart” from patients who visit her seeking an explanation for their pain, with an expectation that there will be a single, incontrovertible diagnosis. Often though, she says, it is more likely that factors such as “a lack of sleep and exercise and a poor diet” are causing the patient’s symptoms, and these can be resolved with minimal medical intervention.
Some women, however, do not accept such a verdict. Invariably, these individuals have already decided they have a certain condition before they see a doctor, and if the GP refuses to validate their beliefs, they “seek out a private specialist and get a diagnosis of an unusual condition,” says Musgrave.
Young women are also more likely to get caught up in “social contagion” – the spontaneous spread of behaviours or emotions previously observed by sociologists in “outbreaks” of bulimia, self-harm and transgender ideology. What may have otherwise been transitory feelings are seized upon and obsessed over until they form a central pillar of a person’s identity. A chronic-illness influencer won’t want to get “better” any more than a female-bodied transgender person would want to re-identify with their sex.
Are the young women sporting crutches and ever-expanding lists of chronic ailments just malingering? As children, most of us pretended at some point to be unwell to get out of a boring family engagement or a miserable day at school. If we put on a decent enough performance (a husky voice, watering eyes, slow movements) we got what we wanted.
When my mother was a girl, she feigned unbearable abdominal pain to dodge a minorly unpleasant task. She kept the act up for so long that when a doctor diagnosed her with appendicitis, she failed to break character – and even when she was prepared for surgery – she couldn’t bring herself to confess. And so, whenever I’d swear blindly I was too unwell to go into class on a Monday morning, she’d remind me of the small scar beneath her stomach.
But this explanation fails to take account of the process whereby “pretending” to be unwell can actually make you feel sick. A young woman who is convinced there is something wrong with her, whether through online self-diagnosis or a rushed GP’s five-minute validation, has changed her perception of her body. Her concerns are reified, altering her entire experience through a mechanism Suzanne O’Sullivan calls the nocebo effect, a “potent generator of physical symptoms through the power of belief”.
Whether the young patient was ever actually sick is beside the point: believe it enough, and you can make your secret fear or hope real. It is too simple to accuse the hundreds of thousands of young women identifying as unwell of having simply made up their symptoms for personal gain. That their pain is real – and now deeply integral to their identity – is perhaps a more frightening reality.
There is another dark side to the phenomenon. For all the talk of raising awareness of disability and acceptance of “different experiences of pain”, the new disability activists have shown themselves to be incredibly unsympathetic towards other disabled people who fail to suit their political narratives. Take Tourette’s. TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of young women showing off their “tics” (uncontrollable verbal or physical outbursts characteristic of the disease). Occasionally, this behaviour can appear remarkably performative. The global pop mega-star Billie Eilish showed her “tics” in a single interview four years ago, yet there has been little sign of them in her hundreds of live appearances since then.
And yet, when John Davidson, a Tourette’s sufferer whose life inspired the film I Swear, shouted a racial slur at a black actor at the Baftas earlier this year – an uncontrollable tic – hundreds of self-diagnosed “Tourette’s warriors” created content insisting Davidson was a racist, because they would never tic in such an unseemly manner. Given that Tourette’s, by definition, often compels people to behave inappropriately in public, it is remarkable how many of its new young sufferers seem to be attuned to social conventions.
Bad luck?
If de-stigmatisation is the only polite explanation for the exponential increase in certain chronic conditions, why is this not true across the board? Half a century ago, around one in 2,000 children was diagnosed with autism. In 2022, a study in the US found that one in 31 eight-year-olds had been diagnosed with autism. In the UK, one in 57 children were on the autism spectrum according to research published by Cambridge University a year earlier.
The increase has come from “high-functioning” (once known as “Asperger’s”) autism patients. What your grandparents considered to be signs of eccentricity, such as an obsessive fixation on a particular hobby or difficulty maintaining eye contact with strangers, is now a case for a formal diagnosis.
The profile of what the medical establishment considers to be a typical autistic person has changed, from young males displaying obvious and debilitating symptoms from early childhood to adults and increasingly females. Much of the attention is now focused on those at the mild end of the spectrum, a shift that Prof Dame Uta Frith, a pioneer of treatment for the condition, describes as making a diagnostic label “completely meaningless”
Mild sufferers of chronic disease rarely experience just one. I was surprised to find during my research into the #Pots community that many individuals also experienced autism, Tourette’s, Long Covid, chronic Lyme and so on. It would require incredibly bad luck indeed for so many of these women to be afflicted by so many completely different illnesses with totally different medical causes. But luck seems to have nothing to do with it. There is a wealth of medical evidence that disorders with no proven pathology overlap. In many of these cases, if the cause is medical, it is strictly psychosomatic. And if it is not medical, it is likely to be based on identity: the desire to increase one’s status through suffering, or to enjoy a larger community of supporters.
Perhaps the young influencers producing comedic videos about having a “touch of the ’tism” reflect our new understanding of the condition as much more common than we thought, as argued by Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world’s leading experts on autism, or just playing around with their identity as teenage girls are wont to do. But how does the family of a non-verbal autistic child, who must be constantly monitored lest they begin banging their head against any available hard surface, respond to the definition of autism now apparently applying to a young woman who seems to excel at social interactions but feels fatigued after spending too much time around her friends?
How do they feel when their child must wait for months to see a specialist doctor thanks to a waiting list now clogged with people suffering from mild social anxiety? What can they do when activists attack charitable bodies like Autism Speaks for failing to keep up with their self-conception of autism as a gift rather than a disease, when their child will never be able to live an independent life?
The cost to the economy
The truth is that it is not harmless to allow a generation of girls to convince themselves they are sick without good reason. Nearly one in 10 people of working age is now claiming a sickness or disability benefit, and the number of children receiving disability benefits has doubled in the past decade. All of the major political parties have acknowledged that disability-related welfare costs are unsustainable, with Reform vowing to compel a quarter of a million people back into work, saving taxpayers up to £50bn, if it forms the next government. Overdiagnosis of minor issues that 20 years ago would have resolved on their own can be ruinously costly.
And it’s not just immediate welfare costs that are placing a strain on public finances. The number of school children receiving SEN (Special Educational Needs) support has soared since the pandemic, rising from one million in 2018-19 to 1.3 million in 2025-26, straining school budgets to the limit. Many of these interventions – for example, extra time in exams and private tuition – have shown limited returns for “mild” sufferers of chronic diseases like autism and ADHD.
As is also the case with dogmatic aspects of transgender ideology, sickness-as-identity politics is especially dangerous for children. We are creating a cohort of young people that is totally dependent either on doctors or activists for emotional support, and broader society for economic support. Joe Shalam, a former special adviser at the Department for Work and Pensions who is now policy director at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, says that the “tragedy is that our welfare system can then reinforce that identity [leading to] long-term economic inactivity [and] wasting enormous potential”.
If there is a sickness identity, there needs to be a recovery identity – not just one that exists to sell people more products. A chronically “sick” person does what a chronically sick person is supposed to do: they withdraw from regular life, struggle with previously simple tasks, receive support and condolences, and rarely, if ever, get better.’”
TheRealThunderChild 