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Why are young women using walking sticks? A disproportionate number of Gen Z females are affected by vague syndromes and may be victims of social contagion

In 19th-century Paris, walking with a cane was a symbol of the dandyish flâneur, strolling elegantly around the city with an ironically arched eyebrow. In 21st-century Britain, canes are the unironic preserve of vulnerable looking girls. Sometimes you see groups of them, each leaning on a walking stick as they edge gingerly along. Startlingly fresh-faced users have been visible at Pride parades for a while, and there are growing numbers on university campuses. The message sent to onlookers is about a life spent in pain; though what kind of pain, exactly, remains unclear. TikTok has hundreds of videos on the subject: how to match your stick to your outfit, how to dance with a cane, how mobility aids can still look hot. And the trend is not just for walking aids.

This week a video went viral of a young woman in a wheelchair at a train station, filming the laborious attempts of staff to get her chair up some stairs after the lift failed. Towards the end of the video, somewhat unexpectedly, she gets out of her chair and walks upstairs herself, saying she “had a bit of energy that day” so could do it. In another video, she films herself putting on roller skates before pushing off from her wheelchair and skating happily away, Lazarus-like. Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on. Why do Gen Z females, apparently unlike every generation before them, have strangely unstable bodies that intermittently require support?

When you dig into their explanations, a few officially medical-sounding words tend to recur: postural tachycardia, joint hypermobility, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. What these syndromes all share is a set of non-specific symptoms, versions of which are familiar to all of us: dizziness, a racing heart, exhaustion, brain fog, muscle pain. And of course, many of these are also symptoms of anxiety, the defining emotion of teenage years. Saying this doesn’t indicate that the syndromes in question don’t exist, but only that it can be unclear whether you really have one.

Could it be, then, that some are taking a cue from internet influencers, overanalysing normal experiences and talking themselves into a disabled state? If true, it would hardly be the first time that young women were in the grip of social contagion — indeed, they are famously good at it.

In her 2017 book How Emotions Are Made, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that emotions are a form of prediction, with the mind trying to decipher bodily feelings according to scripts learnt from the past. She starts with a vivid example of her own. As a young woman on a first date, her stomach started to flutter and she couldn’t concentrate. Soon afterwards she threw up, and realised that what she had assumed were emerging feelings of lust was actually a stomach bug.

What was true of the author then is true of all of us. Our inner sensations don’t come with labels attached but require mental interpretation, which is why cultures differ in their emotional ranges. Humans gradually learn the meaning of their feelings from society around them.

The old-fashioned repressed British script, still beloved of many middle-aged men, said: “Just ignore the painful twinge or weird sensation and it will go away.” Some are so adept at this they literally don’t notice injuries or signs of illness.

These days, the medical profession encourages us to take our physical experiences seriously in case some disease or other can be caught in time. But in certain subcultures, young people are being told that unpleasant feelings should be focused on more than anything else. These feelings may be frightening; but they also make you different, special, excused from the pressures of life, pleasingly fussed over by strangers. And if a person then spends a lot of time sitting or lying down, she will naturally become unfit, so that the next time she stands up or walks any distance she will feel even worse; and the cycle of confused self-interpretation will continue.

To point this possibility out tends to produce anger in those affected or those that care for them. Arguing that certain kinds of disability are socially created, particularly in females, looks at odds with the dictum that young women with chronic illnesses tend to be disbelieved by doctors, and that this is a very bad thing. When talking about trends across huge populations, though, both things can be true — indeed, they might even be connected. And in the socially constructed case, we are still talking about illness rather than deliberate feigning. It’s just that the source of illness is, in part, a story the sufferer has unconsciously learnt. And this is very good news. For unlike biologically fixed disorders, stories can be changed for the better, and happier endings produced for the sufferers concerned. Rather than it being cruel to say this, in fact, it is cruel not to. We owe it to potentially able-bodied young people to challenge their tendencies to neuroticism and fear; to get them out into the world as functioning adults, wherever that is possible. For their sake, we need to help them ditch the props, and — quite literally — to stand on their own two feet.