A strange affliction is spreading around the internet, infecting celebrities, influencers and civilians alike. Its sufferers are spurned by the medical establishment, scoffed at by disbelievers, spurred into “truther” evangelism and struck down by a torrent of mysterious symptoms for which there is no cure. Sound familiar? No, it’s not long Covid, nor Lyme disease, nor even chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s mould.
Ever since a now-retracted study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked black mould to infant pulmonary haemorrhage in the Nineties, mould mania has been raging. On TikTok, #toxicmoldillness posts number in the hundreds of millions of views. Reddit is a trove of evacuation diaries: families forced to abandon their mouldy homes, possessions and pets. GoFundMe hosts pages begging us to “Save the Tyler Family from their Toxic Mould Nightmare!” and “Help Kimberly Heal: A Young Woman’s Fight Against Toxic Mould”. And while sufferers appear to span the political spectrum, the crusade has been taken up with particular zeal by the online Right.
Chronic inflammatory response syndrome, or CIRS, is having a moment. While the condition is not recognised by most medical bodies, true believers report a cascade of symptoms resulting from “mould toxicity” which are oddly evocative of long Covid: neurological impairment, fatigue, respiratory woes, hormonal upset, and so on. Of course, science does accept the pathology of mould: many of us will remember the death of the toddler Awaab Ishak in Rochdale, eight days after his second birthday. Awaab had grown up in a council house filled with black mould, which sent him into respiratory arrest. In the dank houses of rainy England, mould is a real and grave concern. But what mould does not do, as far as the science shows us, is cause CIRS. The British government’s guidance on mould exposure published in the wake of Awaab’s death lists potentially fatal respiratory illness, irritation or rashes on the eyes and skin — but that is it. Under the heading “mental health effects”, it acknowledges that poor mental health may result from mould but does not concede any psychoactive or neurological effects, rather pointing to “unpleasant living conditions”, “frustration” and “social isolation” as causes. The advice is conservative but clear: the mammoth list of CIRS symptoms are simply not attributable to mould. Likewise the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology offers a robust breakdown of CIRS’s plausibility, noting that companies were offering urine-testing kits which were “problematic” and “lacked standardisation”. These are not disinterested parties.
Tell that to the internet. Or to the actress Tori Spelling, who flits in and out of urgent care with children in tow in a “continual spiral of sickness” which she blames on repeated “mould infections”. Or to Brandi Glanville of Real Housewives infamy, whose bizarre, disfiguring health battle has involved a parasite “moving in her face” (a more likely explanation, of course, would be a botched plastic surgery job). In one Instagram video, she shakes uncontrollably while undergoing Hollywood-approved lymphatic drainage; in the caption she blames “black mold poisoning from a toxic house we lived in”. Mould mania has even made it to the American Cabinet: RFK Jr., the pseudoscience-swilling health secretary, has linked it to autism (a typically nuance-crushing claim not backed by evidence).
Then there’s Chris Williamson, the ex-Love Island contestant turned life-coaching podcaster who this month released an incredibly unsettling vlog entitled “It’s Time to Talk About My Health”. At the time of writing, the video had 1.2 million views. In it, Williamson, a big name in the aspirational masculinity market, describes a time of acute personal crisis: brain fog, loss of libido, emotional numbness and depression. The culprit? “My body was filled with environmental mould.” He lives in hotel rooms, paranoid about fungus lying in wait at home. He endures byzantine testing rituals — waking in the night to breathe into tubes, avoiding light, timing fluids to the ounce — then undergoes increasingly baroque homeopathic procedures because, as one white coat testifies, “traditional allopathic medicine hasn’t caught up”. The vlog culminates in Williamson undergoing a procedure to “clean his blood” in Mexico, completing the cycle from masculine rationalist to raving medieval bloodletter, undone by invisible devils in the body and desperate for physical catharsis. His mouldy manifesto seems to be the final form of the manosphere’s “biohacking” obsession: pain, purification, Sisyphean struggle.
But the archetypal mould truther is Jordan Peterson, coincidentally a guest on Williamson’s podcast and a star of that same male self-improvement scene. In August, the Canadian psychologist’s daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, announced that her father was “taking time off of everything” due to CIRS, having recently been “exposed to a particularly mouldy environment” while cleaning out his late father’s house. Peterson was said to have been “near death”, spending “almost a month in the ICU”; the mould was to blame for “cancelled shows, cancelled events, sporadic appearance of being run down and general weepiness”. Peterson had been battling CIRS since 2017, she said. But the case was not straightforward; it was not even the first time Mikhaila was announcing that her father had been close to death. In 2020 she told the world how he’d been debilitated by a separate struggle, this time with benzodiazepine withdrawal. Five years later, an invisible enemy had clawed him back to despair. Peterson’s case is murky and unusual — but Mikhaila’s account did not acknowledge these complicating factors: “The fact that doctors don’t generally recognise that mould exposure in indoor air is causing chronic health issues is insane,” she wrote. Fungus was also the key factor in “our food sensitivities and inability to tolerate anything other than meat” (she and her father both live on an all-meat diet).
It is not anyone’s place to argue with someone who says they are ill; many of those in the “mouldie” community (self-christened, may I add) are likely to be genuinely unwell, just not in the way they think. In our anti-scientific climate, advice from bodies such as the CDC is being degraded by chronic and poisonous scepticism. CIRS did not spring from nowhere: it thrived in the cracks of the public square over years of populist feeling. What CIRS really represents is paranoia, distrust, and a fatal lack of understanding.
The diagnosis is, by no coincidence, also a metaphor for the Peterson mythos. He himself is the archetypal internet patriarch — a proponent of self-discipline, wary of pollution both moral and cultural, laid low by spores in the walls. His family sees this illness as both biochemical and “spiritual” (Mikhaila’s words); it represents an establishment sickness that ignores the little guy and abandons him to splutter his last. But the entire diagnosis rests on contested laboratory markers and anecdotal recovery stories, and the interventions of practitioners who are financially incentivised to keep patients’ paranoia alive. As in all health panics, empirical weakness is rhetorical strength. If the experts deny it, that only proves the conspiracy.
“The diagnosis is a metaphor for the Peterson mythos.”
Frankly, the cult of CIRS has driven “mouldies” mad. Two sufferers who were interviewed for an article in The Cut come across as hypervigilant exiles: one, a woman from Florida, says: “My nose is like a detector of mould. I smell it in almost every house I go to.” A Maryland man says: “There’s actually thousands of us who are living in their vehicles or RVs or tents.” This life-wrecking paranoia is what CIRS is all about: not being believed, fighting an enemy you cannot see but that you insist is there.
In that same article, The Cut describes online forums where users trade reports of “mould rage” — sudden mood swings and the surfacing of harrowing repressed memories blamed on spores in the vents. As with any contested condition, there remains a basis of scientific truth: mould can make you hallucinate. Ergot, the fungus from which LSD is derived, does so when ingested. In the Middle Ages, grain infected with this could, when baked into bread, send entire villages into delirium (the condition was known as St Anthony’s Fire). Uncanny, the BBC’s podcast about hauntings, recently featured a case in which a young man believed that a ghost was helping him wash his hair in the shower; the resident paranormal sceptic suggested that the mildew in his flat may have triggered visions. Under real-world conditions, simply breathing in mould would not provide a sufficient dose to cause delirium: stress, anxiety, depression, sure, but not the neurological effects (brain fog, dementia etc) described by CIRS. For many, the link is nonetheless powerful and evocative: the spore stands in for entropy, psychic seepage. One of the internet’s favourite in-jokes is that the writer and women’s rights campaigner J.K. Rowling has been “turned evil” by black mould which appeared, in one photograph of her living room, to be growing on the walls; “her TERF brain worms may be caused by fungal spores,” writes one snivelling Redditor. Of course, what looked to be a spreading infestation was actually just an unusual wallpaper; but the creeping corruption of mould is a far more compelling story than that.
The allure of CIRS lies both in its metaphorical power — the idea of hidden toxicity everywhere — and its simplicity: if you can name the mould, you can kill it. The problem is that depending on quack procedures which claim to remove fungus from the blood is unmoored from science and reality and will not help these people, many of whom evidently need some sort of intervention — medical or otherwise. It was just weeks ago that the Right was ridiculing the snowflake nepo baby Violet Affleck for telling the UN that everyone should be wearing masks, and that politicians were stealing young people’s future by allowing the pernicious spread of long Covid. Long Covid is also the subject of a culture war, fuzzily understood and probably commonly misidentified, but compared to CIRS it at least holds water as a diagnosis. If we really do have a mould problem, it’s that “mouldies” themselves represent a creeping degradation of science and trust in establishments, the inner rot of fact-free paranoia which is yanking us back to the Dark Ages.
