Julie Burchill
31 January 2004
The Times, Weekend Review

When I was a girl growing up in the blue-collar, red-neck Bristol of the 1970s, I remember well the thing which most repulsed me about older women of my own class.

Now, in my opinion, working-class British broads are generally the finest on earth - look at how Jordan's measuring up; can't you just see her during the Blitz, keeping calm and cheering everybody up by taking off her liberty bodice for the nth time? But they had, in those days at least, one vile weakness. And that was the drooling, eye-rolling, lip-smacking way in which they talked about other women's illlnesses.

That Cora down the cul-de-sac - her WOMB FELL OUT as she was getting on a bus! And poor Eileen down the alley - she had BOTH BREASTS SLICED OFF and the cancer's STILL eating her alive! Believe me, if you were a sensitive
young girl just discovering the tremulous beauty of French novels and Russian ballet, such talk made you want to hack out your primary and secondary sex organs right there and then, just to be on the safe side and to guarantee that your treacherous body wouldn't be able to put an early kibosh on your proposed Life Of The Mind.

Of course, when you met Cora and Eileen, they were as cheerful as the day was long, making jokes about their colostomy bags and the like. The way they wore their riches so casually really annoyed the grisly gossips, who would then go on to moan half-heartedly about their own varicose veins.

So I learnt this lesson at an early age: people who really are ill don't generally talk about it (unless they're actually DYING and a journalist, whereupon it instantly becomes a hyperactive cottage industry) and people who talk incessantly about being ill - or these days, being stressed, or addicted, or having allergies - are generally in rude health.

Looking back, I can see why my Mum and her friends behaved like this - they'd left school at 13, gone straight into factories, got married and that was that. To be brutal and almost risibly stuck-up, there wasn't a whole lot happening in their lives. They were decent, respectable women, and that was their gift and their curse; being human, they desired thrills.
And this being a time when even cohabiting soberly without benefit of marriage was called, with a straight face, "living in sin", illness and the thought of it provided the excitement that sex should have done.

What I find completely puzzling, though, is the resurgence of such behaviour among modern women, especially the educated and privileged. One of the reasons I was always so eager to grow up, shed my skin and escape to the glittering, shallow capital was my sincere belief that I would never again have to associate with people whose lives were so boring to them that only the thought of diseases and death were sufficient to spice them up, and whose self-esteem so low that they seriously believed that only being off-colour could ever make them interesting to others.

For a few decades, I had my wish; one of many aspects of the much-reviled 1980s which was so attractive to me was the absolute lack of introspection and self pity among the movers and shakers; the way in which mental toughness, towards oneself as much as others, was valued more than special pleading.

"Depression is just an extreme form of vanity," said Robert Elms, the Eighties Boy par excellence, to me one evening of a moping mutual friend, "and unlike other forms of vanity it's not even entertaining. It's just boring."

Robert's equivalent today, whoever that may be, wouldn't, couldn't say that now.

Depression is a serious illness, as worthy of sympathy and a vast chunk of the NHS budget as cancer; drinking too much is a "disease", as is taking drugs or liking a flutter on the gee-gees. Everyone is an "addict", in need of "counselling", and it's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, the only people who are expected to hang their heads in shame, the only people it is
perfectly OK to be judgmental about are those of us who are able to incorporate drinking, drug-taking and/or gambling into our everyday lives without ever once feeling that they're the biggest or most interesting thing about us, or that our essential us-ness could ever in a million years come under threat from such minor peccadillos. We're in denial; we're
immature. But don't worry, we only need to scream and shout and blub and beg for help, and then we'll be fine. We'll be grown-ups.

Whether they are suffering an "allergy", an "addiction" or a purely imaginary illness, the monstrous legions of the "Worried Well", as doctors are calling them, are costing us modest mustn't-grumblers dear. About 627 million prescriptions changed hands in the United Kingdom last year; a rise of more than a third since 1997. And are we feeling better now?

No - one in five young Britons, according to Anna Pursglove in Harpers & Queen, claims to have a long-standing illness, mostly made up of headaches, insomnia and indigestion. Backache costs the NHS more than Pounds 480 million each year, and some 12 million GP consultations. More than six million paid sick-days are now taken annually because of "stress". As Pursglove puts it: "We're stressed out by too much work, not enough work, having children, sex, no sex, wealth and poverty.

There's even a claim that not enough stress can be stressful. We are becoming a nation of hypochondriacs and health obsessives."

My fear is that what we are dealing with here, and what is taking desperately needed resources away from the study and treatment of the greatest serial killers - cancer and heart disease - is not just the Worried Well, who are simply boring and bored and seeking drama in their lives, but also the Weird Well - the Pervy Poorly, if you will - whose hypochondria is a straightforward sexual fetish which we, Joe Muggins Taxpayer Esq, are footing the bill for.

We quite rightly condemn and strike off dirty doctors who molest their patients - but who ever brings to book the Pervy Poorly who force innocent young doctors of both genders to repeatedly feel them, to give them their gratis gropes in the most intimate of regions under the pretence of being ill? You rarely hear about this, but doctors, nurses, and GPs have very high levels of alcohol and drug overuse (notice I didn't call it addiction). Their high suicide rate shouldn't come as a shock, but it always does.

If anyone knows the meaning of stress, they do; if any profession could sign its own sick notes, they could. Yet they soldier on, martyrs to the vile modern delusion that it is in some way more desirable to be sick than
to be well.

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away" goes the old saw. But what, pray, does it take to keep all the bad, bleating apples away from the poor doctors, and allow them to get on with their real business of helping the sick rather than humouring the well - both Worried and Weird?

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk