“I felt a huge sigh of relief, said Spice Girl Mel B in today’s Grauniad, “after getting diagnosed with anxiety, dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD in 2019. It means you don’t feel as alone or different or “crazy” any more. I’ve always been able to juggle 50,000 things, but also be almost too involved and too focused. There are many world leaders who have a diagnosis like mine, which shows there’s no limit to what you can achieve.” On the barometer of stupid, Old Spice, or whichever one she is, this is high pressure stuff. In fact, I can feel my blood pressure rising by the second. Why didn’t they ask her something she knows about, like being fabulously rich and famous despite having only a bare minimum of talent?
I do not doubt or wish to ridicule any aspect of her diagnoses. Clearly, they are, or at least can be, massively distressing and debilitating. To remember all the words to ‘Zig-A-Zig-Ah’ must take some remembering, even if someone wrote them for you. Oh sorry – it does look like I’m ridiculing her, but it’s nothing personal. I’d be the same towards all the Spice Middle Aged Women.
It’s the ignorant bollocks she ejaculates into the wankosphere that does it for me. As if these kind of diagnoses mean “you don’t feel as alone or different or crazy”. Yes, you do. My clinical depression diagnosis explained why I was so depressed, my ADHD diagnosis explained pretty well everything that’s gone wrong in my life. They showed not that there was no limit to what I could achieve but they explained why the limits were there in the first place.
At least if you are Mel B, you can afford not just the expensive diagnoses that aren’t available on the NHS, you can afford to treat them, too. Let’s look at the case of a working class boy from a poor working class background – hmm, who could that be? – whose mental health had gone to rat shit by age 12, was diagnosed with clinical depression many years later and last but not least was diagnosed as having ADHD when ‘he’ is too old to do anything about it?
I couldn’t get an autism or PTSD diagnosis if I was sectioned, but a senior forensic psychiatrist, who knows me too well to carry out diagnoses, reckons there’s a strong chance I do. Of course I feel different, you stupid woman, and everyone who knows me well enough sees a crazy person. That’s not relief: it’s a form of death sentence.
But here’s the problem with not very bright people talking about things they don’t understand. Let’s face it. No one would call on me to carry out brain surgery or rewire a house. And something like mental health and neurological conditions – well, don’t tell me that they represent, as Mel B implies, an opportunity. I can’t sing, can’t write songs, can’t dance; all of which put me on a similar level to the Spice Girls – actually, I can write songs: I have around 300 of them, all unpublished and all crap – but therein lies the difference. I didn’t get chosen to me a member of a talentless all-girl group, for some reason or other, and they did.
These things shouldn’t bug me, I know, but they do. Celebrities are often fond of saying things like, “ADHD is my gift.” How could it be? It’s not something ‘normal’. Unless you were, well, crazy, you most definitely would not want it.
But here’s a Spice Girl, famous these days for once being famous, talking brainlessly about brains. Honestly, if I didn’t have such a deficit with my attention, I’d get really mad.
