Article: How having a disability became cool — The Telegraph

Chandelier said:
@Grigor on illness identity:
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Thanks for posting and including the subtitles.

@Grigor is such a great communicator!

I also have not read the article. Why waste time and energy when there is so much else to read.

But hearing it like this, it is an interesting contrast that we lose our professional (amongst other) roles along with so much and have no choice in that. While a journalist chooses that profession and then also chooses to make criticising people in this way part of their identity. I agree with Anil that that is something to feel sorry for
 
Lizzy has posted a very personal response to the article:


She has also released a very poetic ~30sec video for severe ME day this year:
Chandelier

Post in thread 'United Kingdom News (including UK wide, England, NI and Wales - see separate thread for news from Scotland)'

Beautiful reel on Instagram for severe ME day.

No account required:

August 8th is Severe ME Awareness Day in recognition and remembrance of so many enduring the debilitating and relentless reality of living with this condition.

Lizzy, who left a message for Trooper’s Hill in Bristol, has written and recorded a piece for today.
“It was somewhere close…almost within reach, if it wasn't for Severe ME.”
Thank you for your words.

This project holds many of their messages - messages for the places they love but are now absent...
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  • Like
 
Chandelier said:
Lizzy has posted a very personal response to the article:


She has also released a very poetic ~30sec video for severe ME day this year:
Chandelier

Post in thread 'United Kingdom News (including UK wide, England, NI and Wales - see separate thread for news from Scotland)'

Beautiful reel on Instagram for severe ME day.

No account required:

August 8th is Severe ME Awareness Day in recognition and remembrance of so many enduring the debilitating and relentless reality of living with this condition.

Lizzy, who left a message for Trooper’s Hill in Bristol, has written and recorded a piece for today.
“It was somewhere close…almost within reach, if it wasn't for Severe ME.”
Thank you for your words.

This project holds many of their messages - messages for the places they love but are now absent...
Click to expand...
  • Like
Click to expand...

Not being on social media I hadn't seen this. Good for her.

I also hadn't seen the video on the s4me thread as I wasn't around then.

Nevertheless, the video with her words bears striking similarity to a post I made in the forum earlier today.

Just goes to show doesn't it; on or off social media and seemingly decades apart in age where there is no influence on each other, the human experience of severe ME/CFS is expressed in the same way.

With this opinion piece the Telegraph demonstrates more about its own identity than it does ours.

With this in mind, can't wait to see what the public awareness campaign under the ME/CFS Final Delivery Plan is going to look like. Was 'expected' by May 2026. Shan't hold my breath
 
We need to take the words back and sarcasm them.

Next time you have a fall, drop your tea, end up on a drip in hospital, have to have a meal replacement drink, make sure you tag a pic with #sickfluencer #pipsticks #sickprop
 
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MrMagoo said:
We need to take the words back and sarcasm them.

Next time you have a fall, drop your tea, end up on a drip in hospital, have to have a meal replacement drink, make sure you tag a pic with #sickfluencer #pipsticks #sickprop
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As usual the ableds think they will be perfectly healthy forever because they make "smart choices". They'll be playing tennis and riding motorcycles at age 102 until they die peacefully in their sleep one night. Just go from 100% functional to dead overnight.
 
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Joni said:
As usual the ableds think they will be perfectly healthy forever because they make "smart choices". They'll be playing tennis and riding motorcycles at age 102 until they die peacefully in their sleep one night. Just go from 100% functional to dead overnight.
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Or catch Covid, and have a an absolute meltdown that they're not getting better on breakfast TV.
 
Chandelier said:
Good stuff by Dr. Amir Khan:
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Dr. Amir Khan on the Telegraph article.
Found via X/Nitter
I'll put the subtitles in a spoiler to facilitate quoting from it.

Team
so many of you have sent me
the article in the Telegraph entitled
How Having a Disability Became Cool
Apparently young women with chronic illnesses are now being called sickfluencers
and illness has become part of some fashionable
online identity
Can I tell you what I think of
this as a doctor who has spent more
than 22 years looking after patients?
It's bollocks. It's nonsense
And while the author is perfectly entitled to her opinion
she is not medically qualified
I am
And what she describes is simply
not what I see in my consulting room
Being sick
isn't fashionable. Being in pain isn't fashionable
Being too exhausted to get out of bed isn't fashionable
Fainting, missing work, cancelling plans, losing friendships, struggling financially
worrying that people think you're lazy because
you look fine
None of that
is fashionable and none of my patients think
it is
Do some people talk about their illnesses on
social media? Of course they do
Why shouldn't they?
For decades, people with chronic illnesses
particularly women, have been told they're imagining it
exaggerating it, anxious, attention-seeking, whatever
But now they their communities
and we're mocking them for that as well
calling them sick fluences
That just gives us a new word
with which to dismiss them
And yes
we are diagnosing some conditions more often now
That doesn't mean people have invented them
It means medicine has finally caught up
Women's health has been historically under-researched
Women's pain has been untreated
Women's symptoms have been dismissed
So when we finally start recognizing conditions that disproportionately affect women
rather than saying
isn't it funny how everyone suddenly has this?
What we should actually be saying is
why did it take us so bloody long
to listen to these women?
And there is another really important part
to this whole conversation that needs to be said
because this article was written by a woman
but
the patriarchy isn't something only men participate in
Women can uphold the same systems that disbelieve
belittle, and dismiss other women
They certainly can
People with chronic illnesses
don't want to be chronically ill
They want their lives back
They want to work
They want to see their friends
They want to exercise. They want to travel
They want to wake up
and not have to calculate how much energy
or pain
every ordinary task is going to cost them
Just because you haven't lived that
doesn't mean it's not true
Disability
hasn't become cool. People with disabilities have finally become more visible
and that's a very big difference
You're just going to have to deal with
 
Being sick isn't fashionable. Being in pain isn't fashionable. Being too exhausted to get out of bed isn't fashionable. Fainting, missing work, cancelling plans, losing friendships, struggling financially worrying that people think you're lazy because you look fine. None of that is fashionable and none of my patients think it is.
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Love to hear someone who recognizes that this isn't fun. Thanks for sharing.
 
Yes thanks @Chandelier and thanks to Dr Amir Khan. Despite all the problems we face with a broken system it’s good to be reminded that most care. That’s why I hope with some changes and recognition of our condition, with a few people taking responsibility, things can change for the better for us.

They’ll always be people like this journalist but that isn’t everyone.
 
Chandelier said:
pollypauthor.substack.com

The DARVO Trend

A Secret Weapon against the Sick
pollypauthor.substack.com pollypauthor.substack.com

1700-word article.


The DARVO Trend​

A Secret Weapon against the Sick​

​
SEP 20, 2026​
​
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Half the article above is about the thread's Telegraph piece. Snippets:

The most reckless aspect of Coburn’s polemic goes far beyond attacking wheelchair users and likening chronic illness sufferers to children faking a stomach ache to skip school. The true danger lies in how this rhetoric overlooks decades of systemic medical abuse and argues, whether deliberately or unintentionally, for its continuation—with the help of Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan, who appears to have lost the ability to use Google over the past ten years. By inaccurately dismissing ME, POTS, Long COVID, and EDS as unprovable trends, The Telegraph chose to double down on the exact institutional gaslighting, psychologising, and psychosomatisation that have been killing post-viral patients for decades. This includes tragic, preventable losses like Maeve Boothby O’Neill, Sophia Mirza, and Lynn Gilderdale, alongside my own near-death experience last year.
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Despite charities releasing statements to correct the disinformation in the article—clarifying that their words had been heavily misconstrued and quotes taken entirely without their permission—alongside a sea of completely reasonable, measured criticism from actual sufferers, Poppy doubled down.
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The most frustrating part was that within the very thread in which she so convincingly played the victim, her defenders viciously and abusively tore into individuals trying to correct the record, regurgitating vile disinformation straight from the Poppy playbook—and then some. This was aimed at some of the most unwell people I have ever met in my entire life, for whom social media is their only connection to the outside world, most of whom were literally begging her to listen to their story. However, she has ignored every single one of them.
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The Gauntlet: "COVID-19 — not TikTok — is disabling young women"

Article by Julia Doubleday

First few paragraphs:
Last week, The Telegraph published an article titled, “How having a disability became cool,” with the subhead, “Young women, nicknamed ‘sickfluencers’, are turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend and entrenching a culture of economic inactivity.”​
​
This article serves a political purpose.​
​
It shores up the government narrative that rising rates of disability are being driven, not by the ongoing and unchecked spread of COVID, but by people just deciding they want to “identify as disabled”.​
​
This claim is absurd on its face.​
​
Let’s dive in.​
​
People do not drop out of work in order to pursue the lucrative field of professional disability-check-collecting. Governments have a tried-and-true method of avoiding exactly this sort of thing: they force disabled people to live in abject poverty, which does the trick quite nicely.​

The article was reposted on The Sick Times.
 
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You know “sickfluencers” actual social media accounts discussing the creators disability? That’s their job. That’s how they support themselves because benefits aren’t enough.

Do they want disabled people to work or not?
 
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