Over in the UK we have a very influential and poisonous tabloid press which I think contributes more than people realise to a culture of suspicion and mistrust in many areas of life. Some of its regular targets are workers who take sick days and people who are on incapacity benefit, so there are constantly outraged headlines picking on some individual who has been found to be lying about their illness, or denouncing swathes of the population as 'benefit cheats'.

They love to secretly film people or tap their phones, trying to catch them out doing something which their stated illness might preclude them doing - and there's never any acknowledgement that people can have good and bad days, or a limited amount of tolerance for certain activities.

It leads to a general attitude that if someone says they are sick they are probably either lying, hypochondriacs or just lazy. Whenever someone sees me doing something vaguely challenging I feel like I have to go on and on about how I'm having a particularly good day today and about all the opther problems I'm having, otherwise I'll be compared to some stupid tabloid story about some guy who was off work with a bad back but has been found to be a trapeze artist in his spare time.