For 15 years Bella Hadid Has Spoken Openly About Her Lyme Disease, Eating Disorder, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, and Hypothyroidism …
Much of what people have been demanding Bella Hadid “admits” has been on the record since her 2022 Vogue cover, when she walked Rob Haskell through her prescription for Adderall, a calorie-counting app, anorexia, Lyme disease, depression, and the years she spent crying alone in hotel rooms while still showing off every job.
The eating disorder started in high school. A psychiatrist prescribed extended-release Adderall for inattention, suspecting ADHD, and said the stimulant’s food-suppressing effect pushed him to be restrictive. “I was on this calorie-counting app, which was like the devil to me,” she told Vogue. “I packed my lunch with my three raspberries, my stick of celery. She says her relationship with food is healthy now, but the dysmorphia hasn’t gone away: “I can’t even look in the mirror to this day because of that time in my life.”
Lyme disease goes back to eighth grade, when she starts having brain fog, anxiety, fatigue, poor concentration, headaches, bone pain, and crying. His mother Yolanda and brother Anwar were found at the same time. He was also diagnosed with babesiosis, a tick-borne disease. As a teenager he went through ultraviolet blood light rays, ozone therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen, all for Lyme. When she was 20 she was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and started hormone replacement, and she talked about adrenal fatigue on top of it.
The mental health piece has been there all along. “Incredibly insecure, anxious, depressed, body image issues, eating issues, hates being touched, has severe social anxiety,” is how she described herself in 2022, asking how the person ended up in modeling. “For three years when I was working, I woke up every morning crazy, crying, crying alone. I didn’t show it to anyone. I would go to work, cry during the day in my small green house, finish my day, go to whatever small hotel I was in at night, cry again, wake up in the morning, do the same.”
He continued. “In seven years, I have never missed work, canceled work, arrived late.
Disclosure did not stop in 2022. In 2023 he shared medical records and photos of the IV on Instagram and described “almost 15 years of invisible suffering.” Her 2025 cover of British Vogue with Giles Hattersley laid out a list of ongoing diagnoses, including endometriosis, PMDD, PCOS, ADHD, depression, anxiety, and Lyme, and talked about how chronic illness can make a shower or breakfast feel like an accomplishment. In February 2026 she told Gigi in Vogue Italia that she felt “useless” after turning down work for almost a year to receive treatment.
Then last week she posted a tearful Instagram Story about the current outbreak, extreme loneliness, depression, pain, fatigue, brain fog, and the futility of trying every procedure from every doctor. He wrote that “it’s been a daily, changing day for me for the past 15 years.” The next day he thanked the people who checked him.
None of this is new information. It has been in the headlines, in his posts, in his own words, repeated for more than a decade. The pattern that keeps appearing in his comments, the need for him to “finally” be honest about his life, asks to confess the sin he has already committed.
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