Selma Blair reveals doctor urged her to keep MS diagnosis secret

‘The advice was to keep it to myself’, the actor said about her MS diagnosis

Selma Blair has continued to speak out about her Multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis and shared that she was initially advised by her doctor to keep it a secret.

During a recent interview with British Vogue, the 50-year-old opened up about how people close to her have responded to her in the wake of her diagnosis with MS in 2018.

“Groups of friends and love interests lost interest,” she said, before adding that her own doctor told her to keep her diagnosis a secret. “The advice was to keep it to myself. That work ‘wouldn’t have to know’. People didn’t feel safe sharing that stuff.”

MS is “an unpredictable disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and body,” as noted by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Although symptoms vary for everyone, some of them can include numbness in the body, memory problems, and blindness.

Blair also reflected on some of the physical challenges she faced throughout her childhood, decades before being diagnosed with MS. At the age of seven, she told Vogue, she lost use of her right eye, left leg and her bladder.

While the Legally Blonde star didn’t realise this at the time, the symptoms she had were a result of juvenile MS. Her then-doctor didn’t take her health struggles seriously, so her condition as a child went undiagnosed.

“If you’re a boy with those symptoms, you get an MRI. If you’re a girl, you’re called ‘crazy,’” the actor told Vogue.

She continued to reflect on how her health changed throughout her childhood, saying she’d wake up laughing hysterically in the middle of the night. As an adult, she found herself uncontrollably crying at random points.

“I just thought I was a hugely emotional person,” Blair confessed. However, it wasn’t until 40 years later that she realised that this crying was due to damage to her frontal lobe, caused by undiagnosed MS. “I looked like a ‘normal’ girl to them, but I was Disabled this whole time.”

While it isn’t very common, MS can affect the way in which people express emotions, per the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. More specifically, “approximately 10 percent of people with MS” experience “uncontrollable episodes of laughing and/or crying”.

This isn’t the first time that Blair has discussed her doctors’ reactions to her MS symptoms. Speaking to BBC 100 Women in December 2022, the Cruel Intentions star said doctors assumed her symptoms were psychological and would not give her “any real neurological tests”

“[The doctors] would say, ‘OK, what kind of trauma have you had?’ ‘We do think this is psychosomatic.’ But without any real neurological tests,” she recalled.

When she was diagnosed in 2018, Blair said that she felt “unburdened” with “a little bit of panic”. Still, she was relieved to have a diagnosis.

“Like how will I have the energy to ever even deal with this?” she explained. “I have been down that road for so many years without a diagnosis that I did feel kind of hopeless still, but I was hoping that the diagnosis of MS would give me so many more options.”

Elsewhere in the interview with British Vogue, the actor said she hid her MS symptoms throughout the early 2000s and was also struggling with alcoholism.

“Sets were excruciating sometimes with the exhaustion and the tics,” she said. “I took benzos and Klonopin [a medication used to prevent seizures and anxiety disorders]. I didn’t abuse those things, just alcohol. But I was lost and sad and could hardly ever smile. Hence my roles, I imagine.”

She confessed to hiding her MS symptoms when working on her 2004 film, Hellboy, due to her fear of losing her insurance.

“I remember [feeling] very, very poorly on Hellboy and was diagnosed with cat scratch fever and possible leukaemia in Prague,” she added. “I couldn’t tell anybody. I couldn’t admit alcoholism or [access] treatment in my insurance for fear I’d be deemed an insurance risk. I fell apart once I got back to LA.”