Jameela Jamil, an actress known for playing Tahani Al-Jamil in the television show “The Good Place,” was recently attacked on Twitter over accusations that she was lying about her chronic health issues and past accidents.
Jamil cleared up the misconceptions, but not before being accused of having Munchausen syndrome—a mental illness in which people pretend to be ill or hurt for attention. The backlash highlighted a worrying narrative: the idea that those who suffer from multiple chronic illnesses and/or disabilities must be faking it.
Jamil was targeted by Tracie Egan Morrissey, a journalist and podcast host. She claimed her stories about health problems did not match up, and that the number of health problems she was claiming to have were just too many to be plausible.
One health issue Morrissey scrutinized was Jamil’s account of how long it took her to recover from being hit by a car at age 17. In one interview, Jamil stated she was bed-bound for two years and forced to walk with a Zimmer frame. In another interview, she said she was bed-bound for “about a year” and used a wheelchair for “about six months.”
These two accounts do not seem that different, yet Morrissey insisted they were evidence that Jamil was lying. But many people who have suffered from major accidents can tell you that in some instances, they will leave things out of their recovery stories. At other points, they may choose to go into more detail.
It can be exhausting to recount the same story over and over, so one has to find the best way to summarize it without going into too much detail. Recovery is long and stressful, and you do not get out of bed one day completely recovered. It is a long process, and the days can start to blend together.
Morrissey’s issue with Jamil having “too many” health problems is extremely problematic. Almost every chronic illness has several other comorbid conditions that can occur with it. One study estimated that about 24.5% of the population had two or more chronic conditions. Jamil, for example, has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It is a connective tissue disorder that has 13 different types, and it can also cause vascular, skin and musculoskeletal problems. This means that people with the disorder can have any combinations of symptoms, from stretchy skin and loose joints to ruptured arteries.
Not only do physical disabilities and illnesses come with their own comorbid conditions, but if a person has one mental illness, they are more likely to have several others that develop as part of the first one. Depression and anxiety are two of the most common comorbid mental illnesses, as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and several more. Many people who already have a physical disability or chronic illness develop a mental illness as a result of dealing with the constant stress and turmoil that comes with chronic pain and diminished quality of life.
I have personally had my own struggles with chronic illness and disability, and it has gotten to the point where doctors and nurses remark “Wow, that’s a lot of problems for someone so young!” when they go through my chart during appointments. I have an entire laundry list of diagnoses, many of which have overlapping symptoms so some weren’t diagnosed until years after their onset.
I was just diagnosed with narcolepsy last year. Narcolepsy frequently goes undiagnosed, because its primary symptom, excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), can appear in several different disorders such as depression and hypothyroidism (both of which I have). The symptoms usually first start appearing during adolescence, and teenagers are usually more tired and need more sleep anyway.
It took me seven years from the onset of my symptoms to get diagnosed, which left me suffering for years while I just tried to get through the day, managing symptoms that I thought were from other conditions, while being told I just needed to “go to bed earlier” or “have better sleep hygiene” regardless of the fact that I still fell asleep multiple times throughout the day even when I did those things.
That is just one example. But I have countless stories about other conditions and accidents and so do many disabled and chronically ill people. Attacking someone who has gone through these experiences and accusing them of lying is egregious—they have likely dealt with similar comments from medical professionals doubting their symptoms and/or misdiagnosing them.
No one should be trying to “prove” whether a disabled or chronically ill person is faking their conditions or not. It is no one’s business but the individual’s and their doctor’s. There are millions of disabled and chronically ill people all over the world, and to spend time trying to suss out whether all of their accounts of their health problems are the same all the time is ridiculous and harmful. We should be working to amplify this community’s voices, not silencing them.
