21/09/2026
Because *THIS* needs to be repeated again and again until news publishing entities, like The Telegraph, learn and understand!
🔸PSA🔸CHRONIC ILLNESS AND DISABILITY DIDN’T BECOME “COOL.” PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC ILLNESSES AND DISABILITIES BECAME LESS AFRAID TO BE SEEN!!!
I have something to say about The Telegraph’s audacity to continually publish ableist op-ed pieces, specifically the recurring narrative being pushed by Poppy Coburn and Natasha Leake, regarding people living with chronic illness and disability.
The September 5, 2026 article published by The Telegraph, “How having a disability became cool,” describes young women living with chronic illnesses as “sickfluencers,” characterizing disability and chronic illness as a lifestyle or social identity, and ties the visibility of chronically ill people to a supposed culture of “economic inactivity.”
This is not simply provocative journalism.
It is ableist rhetoric.
And it is rhetoric with consequences.
There is an enormous difference between responsibly investigating social-media misinformation, questionable medical advice, benefit fraud, or the commercialization of illness, and broadly portraying people with chronic illnesses and disabilities as though they are participating in some fashionable cultural movement.
Those conversations can absolutely be had… *HOWEVER* they require nuance, evidence, context and, most importantly, an understanding that disability is not a lifestyle trend.
• People do not develop chronic illness because it is fashionable.
• They do not live with pain because it gives them an identity.
• They do not use mobility aids because they want attention.
• They do not disclose their diagnoses because being sick is “cool.”
• And they certainly do not become disabled because they have decided that employment is inconvenient.
For many people with invisible and fluctuating disabilities, the ability to look healthy has become weaponized against them.
▪️If you look well, people question whether you’re really sick.
▪️If you use a mobility aid, people question whether you really need it.
▪️If you advocate for yourself, you’re accused of exaggerating.
▪️If you find community online, you’re accused of seeking validation.
▪️If you discuss your illness publicly, you’re suddenly an “influencer.”
▪️And if you cannot work because of disabling symptoms, somehow your inability to work becomes a question of your character.
THAT is stigma! When a major publication repeatedly packages disability through language associated with attention-seeking, social contagion, overdiagnosis, lifestyle choice and “worklessness,” it doesn’t merely describe a debate. It shapes a false public perception of disabled people.
And THAT matters because:
• The person reading those words may be an employer deciding whether to believe an employee.
• A physician deciding whether to take a patient’s symptoms seriously.
• A family member deciding whether someone’s limitations are legitimate.
• A benefits assessor deciding whether someone’s disability is “real.”
• Or a newly diagnosed young person wondering whether they should be ashamed of needing help.
There is also something particularly troubling about repeatedly directing this narrative toward young women with chronic illness.
Women have a long and ugly history of having legitimate physical symptoms dismissed as anxiety, exaggeration, hysteria, attention-seeking, or something that exists primarily in their minds.
We should be moving beyond those stereotypes, not finding updated vocabulary for resurrecting them.
And I say this not only as someone who advocates for people living with chronic illness and disability, but as a Disabled Army Veteran!
Military service changes lives. Sometimes those changes are visible. Sometimes they are not.
Many service members and veterans live with chronic pain, disabling medical conditions, neurological conditions, autoimmune and systemic illnesses, mental-health conditions, and other disabilities connected to or aggravated by their service.
▪️They did not ask for those conditions.
▪️They did not choose them.
▪️And they certainly did not sacrifice their health and well-being for a “lifestyle.”
▪️ AND the same is true for civilians.
Disability does not discriminate according to whether someone is young or old, employed or unemployed, visibly disabled or invisibly disabled, male or female, civilian or veteran.
• Disability is not a moral failure.
• Chronic illness is not a personality trait.
• Using a mobility aid is not a fashion statement.
• Needing disability benefits is not evidence of laziness.
• And living with a disability does not make someone’s life less valuable.
If The Telegraph wants to investigate fraudulent benefit claims, questionable social-media practices, medical misinformation or the legitimate challenges facing the disability-benefits system, then do that journalism.
Do it rigorously! Do it fairly!! Do it with evidence!!!
Do not take the existence of a visible online disability community and turn it into a convenient caricature of millions of chronically ill and disabled people.
People with disabilities are not asking to be celebrated as “cool.”
We’re asking to be believed.
We’re asking to be respected.
We’re asking for equitable access, appropriate medical care, reasonable accommodations, and the right to participate in society without having our character put on trial simply because our disabilities are not always visible.
And perhaps most importantly:
We are asking journalists who write about our lives to remember that we are people, not a cultural phenomenon to be dissected for clicks, outrage and political talking points.
Disability didn’t become cool.
Disabled people became more visible.
And perhaps what makes some people uncomfortable isn’t that disability is suddenly fashionable. Perhaps it’s that disabled people are no longer willing to disappear quietly into the background.
Last but certainly not least, if The Telegraph is going to publish op-ed articles that dehumanizes people who are chronically ill and disabled, then do the sacred and ethical thing journalism calls for: publish articles written by chronically ill and disabled authors, expressing their point of view on this topic.
Sincerely,
Kristal Kent
Disabled Army Veteran
Founder of The Fibromyalgia Pain Chronicles and Veteran Voices For Fibromyalgia
