Miranda Hart responds to backlash from followers over new e book

Comic Miranda Hart says she hoped to ‘help others’ with her new book, I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You, which explores her battle with a chronic illness that left her bedbound.

Now the star, 51, has turned off comments on her social media channels after a backlash from angry followers, who accuse her work of being ‘dangerous’ and ‘pseudoscience’. 

The book suggests the causes and solution to conditions such as Long Covid, ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are in ‘the brain’s heightened stress response’. 

One critic says, ‘This pseudoscience is worrying’, while Vikings star Jennie Jacques says: ‘Eighty to 90 per cent of this narrative is dangerously outdated.’

Miranda responds: ‘I don’t profess to have medical answers for ME. My learning was how to reduce stress in all aspects of my life.

‘Some of it had unexpected positive effects on my physical health. The misunderstanding and lack of answers is just awful for all of us.’

In her new memoir, released on October 10, Miranda, who has taken a break out of the spotlight for nearly the past decade, talks about her plight and the moment she ‘collapsed’ from ill health.

While fans know the comedian as Chummy in Call The Midwife and for her cheery self-titled sitcom, Miranda has admitted behind closed doors she was desperately telling doctors: ‘I feel toxic and poisoned.’

It took medics 33 years to discover Miranda had been battling with the bacterial infection Lyme disease, after initially mislabelling her as being agoraphobic – an anxiety disorder characterised by symptoms of anxiety in situations.

She recalls running out a doctor’s appointment in floods of tears after they told her she was ‘TATT’ – ‘Tired All The Time’ and said: ‘I just don’t know what to do with you.’

The comic finally received the diagnosis in lockdown and believes she contracted Lyme disease when she 14 after battling nasty flu-like symptoms in Virginia.

She writes: ‘For me it was the unnerving neurological symptoms that I had got initially, aged fourteen, from Lyme, which I always found particularly hard to deal with. 

‘And they got considerably worse as I headed into my forties. As did the fatigue from the cell depletion. Yup, all delightful.’

Of the moment she got her diagnosis, she adds: ‘I got off that Zoom call, pulled my laptop shut and sat there, still and aghast. 

‘So many emotions, I was shocked, but I also immediately felt a deep well of sadness and disappointment – for over three decades I’d KNOWN there was something wrong. I recalled all the times I’d told different doctors, “I feel toxic and poisoned, or, It’s like I have flu every day but I don’t have a temperature.”

‘(It’s amazing how the body can sometimes literally tell us what’s going on.) I felt anger rising at the times l’d been told I must have agoraphobia.

‘I would try and treat it as such, when, as it turned out, it was the lack of energy and the extreme light and sound sensitivity that made my body crash when going out to be in any kind of activity or stimulating environment.’

Miranda says she struggled to know how to share the news of her diagnosis with her followers, fearing she would be perceived as ‘complaining’ or ‘just tired all the time’.

But Lyme disease was causing havoc for her body and she ended up with ‘endless diagnoses’. Also, fans soon noticed her absence from TV screens.