Grimes has revealed that she was recently diagnosed with both autism and ADHD.
The “Genesis” musician, 37, shared the health news in a lengthy message on X on Sunday, March 23 — while calling out “mental health accounts” that she considered to be “extreme infohazards” on the platform.
“Got diagnosed w ADHD / autism this year and realized I’m prob dyslexic which is why I can’t spell at all without spellcheck,” Grimes wrote.
“I feel like, had we known this when I was a child, I would have worked so much less hard, been on drugs, and so many of the weird obsessions and motivations I had would have been seen as pathological and I could have written off certain things that were very hard for me but I’m glad I over came them,” she added.
Grimes performs at Coachella in April 2024.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty
The singer-producer — born Claire Elise Boucher — then wrote that her ADHD symptoms were “infinitely worse when I wasn’t an avid reader,” writing that those “trying to pathologize one of the best things a child can do to help with ADHD” is “so dark.” Her note came in response to another X user who called “excessive reading” in children a “sign of dissociation.”
The American Psychiatric Association notes that symptoms of ADHD — an abbreviation for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — include inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity.
“I think the nature of this uninformed social media mental health subculture is rly a big concern,” Grimes wrote. “Some are great ofc but a lot of these seem like explicitly anti civilizational and geared towards making people worse.”
Grimes has been candid about her health in the past, revealing in a 2019 interview for a fashion campaign that she had part of her eyeball removed to improve her seasonal depression. At the time, the musician shared in an Instagram video for her Adidas by Stella McCartney team-up that the decision was part of her “360 approach” to her overall wellness.
“[I] eliminated all blue light from my vision through an experimental surgery that removes the top film of my eyeball and replaces it with an orange ultra-flex polymer that my friend and I made in the lab this past winter as a means to cure seasonal depression,” Grimes said.
The musician, who shares three children with billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has also recently used social media to share her thoughts on her children being in the public eye. Last week, she wrote that she has “begged” her former partner to stop showing them in public and online, having turned to “legal recourse.”
“I have tried begging the public and my kid’s dad to keep them offline, and I’ve tried legal recourse,” she wrote. “I follow you here, I’ve seen young [people] destroyed by the internet too.”
“The state of my children’s lives being public is of grave concern to me and I think about how to solve this every day,” she added. “It’s insane to me that there’s no way to deal with this. I would hope there was some law that would allow a parent to veto small children from living public lives but I don’t even trust the law to help me now if I tried to invoke it [to be honest].”
“We are in the Wild West of information content and the dismantling of privacy and it’s very concerning,” Grimes concluded.
