FYI, it’s never TMI to discuss mental health

WHEN does FYI become TMI?

When does share become overshare?

There is no fixed answer because it’s totally subjective. But did anyone else felt slightly queasy on reading the source of Michael Douglas’s throat cancer?

He got it, he told The Guardian, not from too much smoking, drinking or whatever, but from the HPV virus — the human papillomavirus. The little virus that is present in around 90% of sexually active humans, that is, almost everybody. Michael Douglas got throat cancer from giving oral sex.

It’s not that I am queasy about sex, or cancer, or HPV. I’ve had cervical cancer myself as a result of HPV — so being queasy about any of that would be a bit hypocritcal. No, it’s Michael Douglas talking about oral sex that made me go pale and bilious. All kinds of images popped up in my head that I couldn’t unpop. Which of course is both ageist and irrational. Had it been someone decades younger and hotter, would there have been any discomfort? Er, no.

Now let’s move on to Angelina Jolie. When she shared about her double mastectomy, was that Too Much Information as well? Of course not. It was heroic the way she raised public awareness about breast cancer. And the way she confronted head-on fixed ideas of “femininity” and what constitutes female beauty. Go Angelina. Stop Michael. Unfair, isn’t it? But that’s gut reactions for you. Rationality is never involved.

It used to be that you couldn’t mention cancer at all. People were so scared of it that they couldn’t actually say the word out loud. It’s still terrifying, but far more treatable, providing you get it in the right place and it’s caught early — it’s a bit of a body lottery. But at least we are talking about it. You know that our attitudes to cancer have moved on when you have Angelina FYI’ing and Michael Douglas TMI’ing about it. Before, when famous people had cancer, they were very, very quiet about it.

Take two celebrities who both had breast cancer. Olivia Newton John stayed private, while Kylie — although keen to keep her private life to herself — went public. The more people talk about stuff, the more normalised it becomes, the less stigma there is, and the less misinformation and misconception. We are all open about cancer now. Even the testicular kind. We are aware, and up front, and not so afraid.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could say the same thing about mental illness? One in four of us suffers from mental illness — like one in three of us will get cancer. That’s a lot of mental illness, yet nobody talks about it. Can’t quite imagine Michael Douglas talking about schizophrenia, or Angelina talking about chronic depression or bipolar or whatever. We still have a long way to go.