For 15 Years Bella Hadid Has Talked Openly About Her Lyme Disease, Eating Disorder, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, and Hypothyroidism…
Most of what people keep demanding Bella Hadid “admit” has been on the record since her 2022 Vogue cover, when she walked Rob Haskell through the Adderall prescription, the calorie-counting app, the anorexia, the Lyme disease, the depression, and the years she spent crying alone in hotel rooms while still showing up to every job.
The eating disorder started in high school. A psychiatrist prescribed extended-release Adderall for inattention, suspecting ADHD, and she’s said the appetite-suppressant effect of the stimulant pushed her into restriction. “I was on this calorie-counting app, which was like the devil to me,” she told Vogue. “I’d pack my little lunch with my three raspberries, my celery stick. I was just trying, I realize now, to feel in control of myself when I felt so out of control of everything else.” She says her relationship with food is healthy now, but the dysmorphia hasn’t left: “I can barely look in the mirror to this day because of that period in my life.”
The Lyme disease goes back to eighth grade, when she started having brain fog, anxiety, exhaustion, poor focus, headaches, bone pain, and crying spells. Her mother Yolanda and brother Anwar were diagnosed around the same time. She’s also been diagnosed with babesiosis, a tick-borne co-infection. As a teenager she went through ultraviolet-light blood irradiation, ozone therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen, all aimed at Lyme. At 20 she was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and started hormone replacement, and she’s spoken about adrenal fatigue on top of it.
The mental health piece has been there the whole time too. “Incredible insecurities, anxiety, depression, body-image issues, eating issues, who hates to be touched, who has intense social anxiety,” is how she described herself in 2022, asking how that person ended up in modeling at all. “For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone. I wouldn’t show anybody that. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little greenroom, finish my day, go to whatever random little hotel I was in for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning, and do the same thing.”
She kept going. “In seven years I never missed a job, canceled a job, was late to a job. No one can ever say that I don’t work my ass off.”
The disclosures didn’t stop in 2022. In 2023 she shared medical records and IV photos on Instagram and described “almost 15 years of invisible suffering.” Her 2025 British Vogue cover with Giles Hattersley laid out an updated 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 she felt “disposable” after turning down nearly a year of work for treatment.
Then last week she posted tearful Instagram Stories about a current flare, severe isolation, depression, pain, exhaustion, brain fog, and the futility of trying every protocol from every doctor. She wrote that it’s “an every day, ebb and flow, for me for the past 15 years.” The next day she thanked the people who’d checked on her.
None of this is new information. It’s in cover stories, in her own posts, in her own words, repeated for over a decade. The pattern that keeps showing up in her comments, the demand that she “finally” be honest about her health, is asking for a confession she already gave.
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