Ren Gill – more commonly known simply as Ren – is a singer-songwriter and musician from Anglesey, North Wales.
He was ‘discovered’ while studying music at Bath Spa University and signed to a sub-label of Sony back in 2010.
His raw, honest lyricism has earned him an incredible 45 million views on YouTube, as his most popular song Hi Ren captured attention across the globe and lead to an invitation to play at Glastonbury. His Instagram following currently stands at 1.7 million, and he even has a range of merch.
So far, so successful.
But that’s not the full story. Not even by half.
Because Ren isn’t just a musician and Hi Ren isn’t just an edgy song. Ren never made it to Glastonbury, and his merch isn’t available to buy right now, as he’s had to take a hiatus from his career due to ill health.
It’s apparent that Ren isn’t your typical indie artist as soon as the video for Hi Ren begins. He’s wheeled into the frame wearing only a hospital gown and holding his guitar.
The song is an autobiographical story. A heartbreaking tale of struggling with illness, through a health system that mislabels and mistreats Ren for years. You really must listen to it – it’s unbelievably powerful.
He sings using two distinct voices that form a fractured dialogue running through the song – one voice is the ambitious and hopeful artist Ren, the other is his illness, spreading negativity and echoing the medical gaslighting he experienced for years.
Depression, bipolar or chronic fatigue?
To get to this part of the story, we need to go back to 2010, while Ren is recording his first album.
That’s when he starts to feel ill. Very ill.
It begins with feelings of exhaustion. Soon, Ren has a laundry list of symptoms from brain fog to muscle weakness, disorientation, and physical pain – like a flu that never goes away.
Things progress, until one day Ren finds himself throwing up blood, and soon he’s had to move back in with his mother, bedbound for up to 23 hours a day. Unable to walk around his own bedroom, much less record in the studio or perform on stage.
It must have been terrifying – feeling like his life is ending right as it is beginning.
So, what is wrong with Ren?
Next comes a long and fraught battle for diagnosis. The path to answers is not an easy one.
Ren is diagnosed with depression, with bipolar, and chronic fatigue disorder by different doctors through the years – as he recounts in Hi Ren.
Indeed, exhaustion and physical pain aren’t uncommon symptoms of mental health conditions. And Ren is an edgy creative type who was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age – prone to mental health problems, right?
So Ren puts his trust in his doctors and submits himself to various therapies, counselling and medications. None of which make him feel better.
It’s not until 5 years of fighting for answers, that Ren flies to Brussels for chronic fatigue syndrome testing. Here, he finally gets to the bottom of things: Ren is diagnosed with Lyme Disease.
At long last, everything makes sense.
Unfortunately, a correct diagnosis hasn’t been a magic wand to full health. He’s spent a huge amount of time and money flying around the world to try different treatments to address the Mast Cell Activation Disorder that his untreated Lyme Disease caused, including an experimental stem cell transplant that left him with brain damage and PTSD.
Ren continues to battle with the debilitating symptoms of Lyme Disease, creating and performing while he can, and simply resting when he must.
In the meantime, his music still inspires. And not just music fans, but the medical community too.
Many doctors and patients alike have created reactions videos to his viral video, and psychiatrist.com published an article about Ren’s song and what it illuminates about mental health misdiagnosis.
The secondary face of a primary condition
Perhaps Ren did not have a mental health condition in the beginning at all. He certainly went on to experience poor mental health throughout the years of testing, being bedbound, and being told it was all “in his head”.
Perhaps he was depressed and anxious precisely because he was suffering with an unknown medical condition. At a certain point, it becomes very hard to separate the two.
According to the NHS, 40% of people with a mental illness are living with a long-term condition. When it comes to medically unexplained symptoms, that number rises to 70%.1
Which brings us to a really vital question.
The more that awareness and acceptance of mental health conditions grow, and stigma continues to fall, are we at risk of slapping mental health diagnoses on patients, when their mental health symptoms are secondary to a physical health issue that lies behind?
There is a term for this kind of misdiagnosis: diagnostic overshadowing.2
And while Ren’s story is shocking, diagnostic overshadowing is not uncommon.
Besides Lyme Disease, people seeking diagnosis for digestive disorders, thyroid condition, fibromyalgia, MS, menopause and many more, are misdiagnosed with mental health problems. Just recently I read a report that notes women who present to doctors with dyspnoea of COPD are commonly told they don’t have COPD, but anxiety disorder.3
And the situation is even more grave for people with intellectual disabilities, who are at the highest risk of diagnostic overshadowing, whereby a health issue they are facing is interpreted as poor mental health or a behavioural issue.4
It’s somewhat understandable, being as depression and anxiety are well documented co-morbidities for chronic health conditions and disabilities.5
But clearly, work needs to be done to help clinicians look beyond mental health symptoms at play and rule out anything that could be triggering it or lying beneath.
Given the statistics are worse for women and people with intellectual disabilities, it stands to reason that implicit bias and miscommunication could be fuelling this issue, and perhaps our efforts to change the system need to start here. So that more cases like Ren’s don’t have to play out.
Ren, we’re sorry for what you’ve been through, we salute you for using your talent to raise awareness of this important problem, and we really hope a cure finds you.
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