FASHIONABLE DISEASES
Daily Telegraph - June 2006

THE news this week that ADHD medicines are being disproportionately prescribed in lower income areas can mean only one thing: like cargo pants and Von Dutch caps before them, ADHD has hit the Go-Lo crowd. Parents in wealthier suburbs need a new disease fast, if only before Franklins starts selling generic Ritalin.

To say that everything is now a disease would be an exaggeration. To say that everyone has one would not. As a hypochondriac, I appreciate there is a vast new range of fashionable disorders for me to choose from. As a selfish, spiteful individual, however, I find other people's fictional ailments produce in me only symptoms of EDD (Empathy Deficit Disorder).

Of those who claim irritable bowel syndrome, I can honestly say it is not their bowel alone I find irritating. Chronic fatigue has only the power to fatigue me, chronically. And sufferers of “lactose intolerance”, please be aware that on the long list of things of which I am intolerant, lactose pales into insignificance compared with people who drink soy milk.

Even obesity, we are now told, is a disease. If this is true, it is a plague that seems to have mercifully spared the three-quarters of the world's population for whom a Happy Meal is the equivalent of a year's wage, a university education for their eldest child and a new saddle for the family goat.

Of course, not all fashionable diseases are imaginary. Many are real, although no less in vogue. Coeliac disease, for instance, is an actual, albeit relatively rare, condition of gluten intolerance. This doesn't change the fact, however, there are hundreds of North Coast hippy women pressing amethysts into people's abdomens and telling them that toast loaf is killing them.

Asperger's syndrome is another condition which has had a dramatic rise in diagnoses in recent years. A genuine developmental disorder, it is, unfortunately, frequently confused with having a surly kid who hates his parents for reasons probably explained by the fact he's called Romeo and that his mum makes him smoked eggplant sandwiches and keeps taking him to the doctor for blood tests.

For every disease that has had its 15 minutes there are, however, just as many that never made it. Mad cow disease, for instance, keeps threatening to go mainstream but has never managed anything more than underground buzz. Which must mean that whoever's doing the PR for bird flu is some kind of genius. If only SARS had employed them before it went the way of razor scooters.

Yet if fashion is cyclical then some diseases are clearly due for a comeback. With the '80s revival now in full swing why not consider Epstein-Barr or claiming that you're “allergic to the 20th Century”? In architecture, I hear “sick building syndrome revival” is the new mock-Tudor.

With ADHD now being abandoned by taste-makers, how long before we spot a new trend? Probably as long as it takes a drug company to create one, I'm guessing.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008