Of all places, it began in front of the TV. While watching hospital dramas, such as Holby City, ER, and the typical evening fare, Diane Hastings noticed that something in her hand and something on screen matched. A tiny shudder. She had been silently ignoring a flicker. By most people’s standards, she was far too young—39 at the time—to be considering a condition that is typically associated with old age. However, the suspicion grew, and when medical professionals verified it in 2003, the diagnosis came with the ruthless indifference these things always seem to carry. Her husband, Gavin, was in…
Author: Jack Ward
The patient is twenty-four years old. She settles in, says she’s fairly certain she has ADHD, and opens her phone before she’s completely seated. It’s with her partner. She has been reading. This sentence has become a sort of opening ritual for the clinician across from her, who has heard it so often that it hardly registers as new information. The important thing to note is that the discussion that ensues is no longer a diagnosis. A negotiation is taking place. Even though that shift is tiny, it completely alters the hour. For the majority of the modern history of…
Almost no one discussed having a private assessment a few years ago. You held off. You added your name to a list, eventually received a letter, and the entire process took place gradually within the public system, as these things were meant to. That has changed, and since there was no announcement, it has changed in a way that is simple to overlook. It gradually spread, one person at a time, until all of a sudden half of the people you know appear to have either paid for an evaluation or are secretly considering it. The figures that support this…
When a patient describes feeling everything too much, a certain expression appears on a clinician’s face. The eyes tightened a little. The next question is followed by a pause. Sometimes, during that pause, a quiet decision is made that the patient won’t find out about for weeks, if at all. The term “borderline” is recorded. Additionally, once a word appears in a chart, it usually stays there. These days, it’s difficult to ignore how frequently this occurs. You can find waiting rooms full of people who have been told at some point that their emotions indicate a personality disorder if…
On weekends, a certain type of fatigue persists. At eight in the morning, you can see it in coffee shops with laptops open, AirPods in, and a half-eaten oat-milk muffin left on the side. During the third Zoom of the morning, you can see it in a colleague’s somewhat dazed expression. It’s a fatigue that lurks behind the eyes, and it’s starting to affect a whole generation of workers informally. The so-called “hustle culture” did not appear out of nowhere. We bought it. Productivity was first marketed as a virtue, then as an identity, and finally as something akin to…
I first became aware of it at a small clinic in a peaceful area of north London, where a therapist casually mentioned that three of her new clients that month had come in discussing wildfires they had never seen firsthand. not a loss. not a divorce. not at work. fires. Speaking with clinicians these days gives me the impression that the types of distress that patients present with have changed. It’s difficult to diagnose climate anxiety, or eco-anxiety, as some still refer to it. The DSM does not include it. However, therapists in North America and Europe consistently report the…
The picture of a woman crossing the finish line of the New York City Marathon in November 2023, her husband waiting to embrace her, and neither of them explicitly stating what they already knew is almost intolerable. Only a few weeks prior, he had received a glioblastoma diagnosis. Carrying that weight, she ran 26.2 miles before grinning on television the following morning. Sheinelle Jones got up early, drove to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, sat on the Today show couch, and laughed at her co-hosts’ jokes for almost a year. After that, she and her husband, Uche Ojeh, got back in a…
For years, the term “Vanessa Paradis’ illness” has been subtly rising in search results, but oddly, it doesn’t really lead anywhere. According to all reliable accounts, she is doing well. working. traveling. Seated in the front row at Chanel in Paris in October, she appears to be a woman who intends to stay for some time. Nevertheless, the rumor continues to evolve, fueled by YouTube channel thumbnails that claim she is “between life and death,” only to present thirty seconds of stock footage with a voiceover that defies the headline. Because no one ever finishes reading it, this type of…