Susannah Constantine: ‘People have jumped on the ADHD bandwagon – it makes me angry'

Telegraph

08-03-2025

The first signs of spring can be seen through the windows of Dencombe House, an exquisite mansion in 127 acres of prime Sussex with rolling views towards the Downs. It is all land owned by Susannah Constantine, 62, one half of the famous Trinny and Susannah duo.
The pair started out by delivering fashion advice to women in a weekly Telegraph style column before it evolved into their Bafta-winning TV series, What Not To Wear, in 2001. Their well-meant and expert sartorial opinions delivered like hammer blows in grand voices overhauled bigger/busted/bottomed women, while the accompanying books sold 2.5 million copies, hitting number one in the UK and US bestseller lists.
Constantine and I are sitting on a sofa in her beautiful day room. Dressed in navy pinstriped trousers, navy fine knit sweater and heavy boots, she is dragging away on her vape – cigs now abandoned - effing and blunt talking in the way that made her instantly watchable on TV.
Trinny and Susannah's professional partnership came to an end in 2009 when ITV, (who had poached them for £1.2 million) sensing perhaps a turning of the tide, pulled the plug on the show. Still, the proceeds from the WNTW juggernaut (their most successful book netted sales of £8.7 million alone), along with Constantine's husband's career in finance, paid for this house.
It's impressive, as it would be easy to assume that Dencombe was the spoils of vast, inherited Constantine upper middle class family wealth (her father was a shipping tycoon). But, in fact, that wealth dwindled over the years, eventually depleted by her mother's care home fees.
Now she says that What Not to Wear would never get made in today's atmosphere of body diversity and inclusivity: 'We loved helping women but this woke world [would have] no truck with two middle-aged women touching t--ts. There is a hunger for a makeover show,' she says 'but it would have to be seriously modified.'
Their show was aired across the world and they went on tour – America, Israel, Australia, New Zealand – like celebrities: 'I had to go into therapy to be able to leave my small children behind, but the actual work I adored.'
Trinny Woodall is still her best friend and is now at the helm of the £180 million skincare and makeup empire Trinny London: 'If Trin and I were on a boat that was sinking and she had her family and I had mine and we were all about to die, we agreed there would be a question over who we'd save first, whether it would be our family or each other.
'We are very close. I'd saved a bit of money and in 2017 wanted to invest [in Trinny London] but my husband [Sten Bertelsen] said, 'I don't think it's a good idea.'' She pulls a face, 'so that's a regret! I knew she'd make it a success, although perhaps not on this scale. Trin is extraordinary. There's nobody like her, apart from perhaps Bill Gates.'
In comparison to Woodall, she seems to have disappeared from the spotlight. Back in 2015, Constantine appeared on I'm a Celebrity and then, in 2018, on Strictly (she didn't last long on either) but there have been no more reality TV shows: 'I haven't retreated from the limelight, the limelight has retreated from me!' she says. 'To be fair, I'm too old for those long hours.'
She is now an established writer, a career which suits her better. Her 2022 memoir Ready for Absolutely Nothing (two novels prior) garnered much praise for its ability to convey the world of upper middle-class privilege with the power of perspective and self-parody.
Constantine is currently working on a crime novel, alongside her writing partner, the comic scriptwriter Charlotte Sones. It will be funny, 'about friendship and simmering resentment. It's total fiction, but people will see a lot of parallels with Trinny and Susannah.'
Today, I am meeting Constantine for quite a different reason. She has added her voice to the societal discussion of ADHD, having appeared on the ADHD Chatter podcast with her eldest daughter, Esme, 23. Together, they spoke publicly about Esme's ADHD diagnosis for the first time. The conversation explored Constantine's past parenting mistakes and lessons learned. 'I am really proud to have ADHD and I would love other people to feel the same,' Esme said, while acknowledging too that 'it's a struggle'.
Esme's ADHD diagnosis came six years ago during her A-Levels. Then a year ago, Constantine's second daughter, Cece, now 21, was also diagnosed while at Bristol University.
The more Constantine discovered about ADHD, the more she realised that she too has it, undiagnosed: 'Not being able to focus, like having a Ferrari brain with bicycle breaks that's always whirring, hyper-focused but then getting bored very quickly, really low self-worth. I understand so much more about it now.'
'Not nearly so much was known about ADHD in girls back when Esme was diagnosed, it was largely associated with boys.'
It will be 30 years in April since she married Bertelsen, then an investment banker, who now works in the authentication and verification of commodities. They have an older son Joe, 26, in the Navy 'on a ship somewhere', who does not have ADHD. None of the children live at home any more. Esme is in London collaborating on a new art exhibition and Cece is reading psychology at Bristol.
There are three dogs jumping around and a cat somewhere in the corner. Constantine wild swims in the sea or dips in an ice barrel by the back door. She runs every day and walks the dogs in the forest (all theirs). Constantine's office is a particularly pretty drawing room, with a desk looking out at the view.
She grew up in Kensington and on the Lincolnshire estate of Belvoir Castle. Her parents were friends of the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, and she almost did become a countess – a royal one due to her six-year relationship (1983-89) with David Armstrong-Jones, then-Viscount Linley, Princess Margaret's son – but it was not to be.
Her marriage, she says, has withstood a lot, not least her own alcoholism, which she addressed finally by going to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in 2012, when she was 50, after five years of heavy drinking. Two years followed of relapsing 'but I've been sober for 10 years now,' she says. Her mother and her grandmother were both alcoholics.
She had been drinking two bottles of wine a night straight from the bottle. 'I sat them all down the day after I blacked out and fractured two transverse processes and said 'I've been lying to you. I've got a problem. I need help.'
Constantine's mother was frequently suicidal during her and her elder sister Annette's childhood, and bipolar too.
The recent ADHD diagnoses in the family are proof that parenting continues in a different shape, however old your children are. 'Fewer but bigger problems' is how she puts it. Still, so many marriages can buckle when children finally move out: 'It's like you come out of a coma and you've got this stranger who you sort of know standing next to you. It's like meeting them all over again.'
Esme pursued her own ADHD diagnosis while at boarding school: 'And I didn't take that too seriously,' Constantine says, 'thinking guiltily, 'Well, school can cope with it.'' It resulted in intermittent medication. It was only since appearing on the podcast with Esme that Constantine really got to grips with the condition. 'Six years ago, if Esme was in bed at 3pm, I'd be 'Get up you lazy cow.' Now I understand that that is so common with young people who have ADHD.'
Cece's diagnosis last year was after an equally rigorous testing process. She is much more contained and 'ordered' than her sister, Constantine says, much less 'typical' ADHD if such a thing exists, and proof ADHD is never one-size-fits-all.
'I've always been very honest with my children. None of us are perfect. So many people pretend everything is wonderful, like Instagram, even to their children. I do feel I've done a good job with them, although by chance rather than design.
'A lot of people have jumped on the ADHD bandwagon. It's become this throwaway line, like a trending hashtag. But you can't just self-diagnose. It makes me angry because it takes away from the seriousness of the illness. And it makes it hard for parents [to take it seriously]. It's so easy to brush ADHD off which is what I did at first.
On the podcast, Esme told Constantine that, despite her initial dismissiveness, she was the best mother. It made Constantine cry – 'and I never cry'.
Esme's ADHD meant that for a while she became so claustrophobic that she couldn't travel on public transport; she now boxes, meditates, and takes medication when she needs it.
Cece has an ADHD coach to help her with the coping mechanisms she uses so as to not internalise her symptoms: 'Cece's symptoms were about the need for control and I worried at first it was to do with her having witnessed my own drinking.'
When Esme admitted to binge drinking to cope with social anxiety, it was a red flag for Constantine: 'I've had the alcoholism conversation with them,' she says. 'I've told my children 'This is a genetic disease. One of you might well have it. Just be aware.''
The ADHD discussion has brought up other issues. For the first time, Constantine admitted to how she too, while drinking, had felt suicidal, like her mother: 'I wanted to be hit by a lorry,' she says of the period when her drinking was at its worst. 'I'd much rather someone else did it for me. I didn't want the responsibility of having to do it myself.'
'Generational trauma' is a common phase these days. Constantine, for all her openness, is still very old-school English. She's not a dweller. 'I've had loads of therapy. It never worked because I'm emotionally shut down [to my past]. I have a belief that everything will be OK. I do wonder if ADHD explains why I live in the present, I don't look back and I don't worry too much about the future.'
She has measures in place now to help with her anxiety – the swimming, the running and a supplement called Saffrosun Calm – but first thing in the morning it is especially bad: 'If there's nothing to feel anxious about, my brain will find something.'
The need to please people has lessened over the years: 'It's easy to pigeonhole people like me. Yes, I am privileged, but I've worked f------ hard. It doesn't matter where you come from. Being privileged is not something I created. Sometimes I get that almost-guilt – what I call paradise paranoia – and I ask, 'Why am I so lucky?', but it makes me believe in reincarnation. If I am at the top of the chain now, I was probably a cockroach [before]. The cycle will start all over again.'
There is no denying her privilege, past and present. There are antiques everywhere (inherited from her father), paintings, tasteful furnishings and soft silk lampshades. But, conversely, Constantine's mental health worsened when she moved to this rural idyll from London.
A life in the countryside had been all she had ever wanted. If Dencombe presented security, the reality was the opposite: 'I had realised my dream. I had nothing else to dream for.' This was exacerbated by the end of WNTW. She had kicked against being 'just' a wife, 'just' a socialite all her adult life.
Now she was in the country, a mother and a wife, with no ostensible job.
A combination of resilience and emotional bonds have helped her go the distance. Like Constantine, Trinny Woodall has also endured much. Their daughters, Constantine's two and Trinny's one, Lyla, 21, are best friends (Esme and Lyla appeared on the cover of Tatler last year). In November 2014, Woodall's ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff, Lyla's father and Trinny and Susannah's very close friend, took his own life when, aged 55, he jumped from the roof of Whiteley's shopping complex in Bayswater: 'Johnny, like Trin, was family.' Constantine says: 'When Johnny died, it was terrifying. The worst is thinking of the abject pain he was going through to do something like that.' He struggled with an addiction to painkillers.
At 62, Constantine is still beautiful. As a young woman in her twenties she was also dynamite. The early photos in her memoir are proof: 'Nobody in my family has read that book,' she says, 'Nobody cares.' I get the impression she likes it that way.
During Constantine's time with Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret became almost like a mother: 'God I loved that woman,' she tells me. Constantine often stayed with the Queen Mother and the Queen. Royal life was not for her in the end – no proposal materialised – and after a dalliance with Imran Khan, she married Bertelsen in April 1995: 'Looking back at that period, it's as if I'm writing about somebody else,' she says of the royals.
'I miss how the Royal family used to be. I miss the way the Queen conducted herself. Then the monarchy had such a foothold in the country. Now they've just become celebrities. I don't know if there's the same level of respect and awe. You only create awe in your audience if you don't know so much about them. Now the media expects so much more.'
Of the Princess of Wales' and the King's public cancer diagnoses, for example, she says '[In the past] the surgeon would have done a quick little press conference.' And what of Meghan this very week, turning up on Netflix with her fruit platters and her beehives, misjudging the tone yet again?
'I don't know what's true or not true about her but the poor woman can not win.' She won't be drawn into criticism, even about Meghan and her extremely un-English self-absorption. Constantine, in contrast to the Duchess, would have made a very good royal, 'buggering on' without complaint. No wonder Princess Margaret adored her.
An example of this is how Constantine dealt with a near brush with death. At the end of 2021 she experienced an extreme rushing sensation in her ears coupled with a tingling in her fingers. She took herself off for an MRI. It came back with the note: 'see neurosurgeon immediately'. She handed it to her GP, but didn't follow it through. Eighteen months passed. She shrugs at my astonishment. 'I thought 'Oh I'm sure it's fine.''
But her symptoms worsened until finally she couldn't use her left arm at all. Only then did she go back to the GP. Her scan was found on the system but had gone unread. She was ordered to hospital immediately and diagnosed with arteriovenous malformation, a rare neurological condition that disrupts the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain. Without surgery, she had a one in three chance of stroke, paralysis or brain haemorrhage, with odds getting worse with age. With surgery, she had a one in 10 risk.
She went ahead with the operation; two surgeons operating through both sides of her groin. 'It was very serious. It really freaked me out and I was very scared.'
A friend recommended a spiritualist in the US for guidance: 'I can't stress how unlike me that is,' she says. Broadly, she was told, she'd be fine, 'although I can see your husband crying,' the spiritualist said.
The operation was a success. The capillaries were unknotted, and it stopped a bleed which had been pressing on her brain. The following day she was allowed home. 'Can you believe I walked through the door from hospital and my family asked 'What's for dinner?' I said to them 'You f------ a---h---s, I almost died. You can all go and f--- yourselves.'
'Even with the equivalent of a brain tumour I wasn't off the hook…' She pauses. 'It was actually very funny.' We're firmly back on brand here.
She hasn't dwelt on this near miss: 'I think it is old fashioned British stoicism, again dating back to when I was a child and I [felt] like I was on my own and I had to cope.'
Today, it feels as if Constantine has found a way of living and working – through her books, her Instagram and podcasts – that allows her to prioritise mental health, her own and her childrens'.
'I'm fundamentally quite a lazy person,' she sighs. 'I couldn't have done what Trin has done [with Trinny London]. My mental health wouldn't have been able to stand it. Looking back, it wasn't my natural place to be on television. I'm leading the life now that I always wanted.'