Ben Fogle Illness

Watching Ben Fogle on TV has an almost dizzying quality. He’s tanned, he’s smiling, he’s standing next to someone who lives in a yurt on the side of a Norwegian fjord, and everything looks like a postcard. For more than two decades, Fogle has been the most reliably cheerful person on British screens the sort of presenter who makes you feel like fresh air is a personality trait. Beneath that effortless kindness, however, the man has been discreetly managing a physical and psychological past that would make most people want to live indoors forever.

In a sense, it began with something very terrifying. Fogle has an unhealing wound on his right arm when he returned from filming the BBC adventure series Extreme Dreams in the Peruvian jungle back in 2007. What emerged was leishmaniasis, a parasitic sickness spread by sandfly bites that is frequently referred to as a flesh eating disease. His arm developed a big, gaping hole. He received an extensive course of antibiotics at the Hospital of Tropical Diseases in London, which caused him to throw up, have muscle convulsions, and at one point fight minor pneumonia. He was thirty four years old.

He subsequently made a full recovery, but there’s a feeling that the incident had an impact that went beyond the physical wound. Even if you’re the type of person who enjoys rowing across the Atlantic, the world seems a little less secure when your body betrays you in a jungle thousands of miles away.
In 2005, Fogle even rowed across the Atlantic alongside James Cracknell.

He ascended Mount Everest. He ran all the way to the South Pole. A cautious man would not engage in these pastimes. However, what transpired in 2023 tragically demonstrated that mental toughness and physical stamina are not necessarily synonymous.

Fogle has referred to it as a wobble, a storm, a blip, and finally a collapse caused by exhaustion. He was quite open when he spoke on the High Performance podcast, admitting that he had overdone it, ignored the warning signs, absorbed too much,

had high expectations, and had run too fast for too long. I eventually popped, burst, he remarked. The way he recounts it is devoid of drama. Just a sort of confused candor, as though he still finds it hard to believe that occurred to him.

The symptoms were quite bad. He has talked about terrible fear and paranoia, emotions completely alien to a man whose public presence is based on friendliness and openness. He talked of feeling anxious for what seemed like the first time in his life. It’s hard not to wonder how many people around him saw it coming.

Because everyone else believes they’re alright, the most capable people are sometimes the last to realize they’re crumbling. The rebuilding phase that ensued included medication, cognitive behavioral therapy, and what Fogle has referred to as alternative therapies. He made his life simpler. less social media posts. less labor. less strain.

The list may seem overly simple, but anyone who has experienced anything similar understands that the hardest advice to follow is frequently to do less, particularly if your job requires you to be everywhere at once. By 2024, he was posting on Instagram that he felt like his calm old self once more. However, it’s debatable if anyone can truly revert to their previous personality following such an event.

The diagnosis of ADHD followed. Following his collapse, Fogle disclosed in 2024 that he had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He claimed that the title helped him understand himself rather than define him, thus he was careful not to let it dominate him. The fact that ADHD in adults, especially those who have spent decades hiding it with unrelenting activity and accomplishment,

sometimes goes undiagnosed until a crisis compels the question is becoming more well recognized. Fogle is nearly a perfect fit for that pattern. The qualities that made him an exceptional adventurer his desire for stimulation, his inability to remain still, and his continual movement may have also contributed to his eventual collapse.

A discussion of Fogle’s health would be incomplete if it did not address the personal losses that cast a shadow over everything else. His wife Marina experienced a serious placental abruption at 33 weeks in 2014, which resulted in the stillbirth of his son Willem.

The fact that Fogle wasn’t there for the birth troubled him later. In 2008, the couple had already experienced a miscarriage. These things don’t heal well. It’s probable that some of the emotional burden Fogle carried into 2023 had roots that date back years, as they lurk beneath the surface and reappear at unexpected times.

More recently, Fogle was taken to the hospital while filming a new season of New Lives in the Wild in Montana. I ended up in hospital, but that’s a whole other thing is how he nonchalantly brought it up on Good Morning Britain before continuing as if getting hospitalized on set were just another Tuesday.

He didn’t elaborate, which only made it more unsettling. There is a subtle irony in Fogle’s presentation of the show, which is currently in its twentieth season on Channel 5 and follows individuals who have given up traditional life to live off grid.

He’s spent years traveling to people who left the cacophony behind, and now he’s publicly stating that he hopes to do the same, perhaps in a cabin in Sweden or Norway or on an island in the Arctic Circle. Paddling a canoe, swimming in chilly water, and cutting wood.

It remains to be seen if he will truly carry it out. Fogle lives in a nice Henley on Thames home with a tennis court and a vegetable garden. He has a family, a job, and two Labradors. It’s not quite pain. However, the desire feels genuine and relates to a larger point he has been making, which is that everyone is feeling a little under the weather due to modern life’s unrelenting social media, noise, and constant comparison.

He cautioned, We’re all in danger of being overwhelmed, in an interview with Radio Times. That’s hardly an insignificant statement coming from someone who once rowed an ocean.

Observing Fogle’s development over the past few years reveals a type of slow, obstinate honesty rather than fragility. He isn’t using vulnerability to get clicks. He’s publicly expressing his sincere attempts to make sense of what happened to him because he believes it could help someone else do the same.

Ben Fogle’s experience serves as a reminder that those who appear most resilient are frequently simply those who have learned to keep going, whether it’s the flesh eating sickness that almost cost him his arm, the grief that never really goes away, or the breakdown that made him reevaluate everything.

i) https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/ben-fogle-mental-breakdown-adhd-b1266781.html
ii) https://www.adhduk.co.uk/2024/02/23/ben-fogle/
iii) https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/ben-fogle-opens-up-quitting-36585245