In the first episode of ABC’s Australian Story 2025 season, Celeste Barber opens up about her battle with ADHD, shedding light on the personal challenges and bullying she faced growing up.
With unmatched honesty, she reflects on how these experiences shaped her journey to becoming one of Australia’s most beloved performers.
From ABC:
In Australian Story’s 2025 series premiere, social media phenomenon Celeste Barber talks with extraordinary candour about her struggle with ADHD, revealing a never-before-seen vulnerability.
Offering an unfiltered insight into her neurodiversity, Celeste recounts how the undiagnosed condition led to her being badly bullied as a teenager, leaving permanent psychological scars.
“You still question it,” the comedian and actor tells Australian Story.
“And then if something in life happens and it brings back that feeling, you’re like, ‘oh, I knew it, I knew I was shit’.”
While she is now one of Australia’s best-known performers, Celeste was an out of work actor when she burst into the public consciousness in 2015 with her Instagram parodies of celebrities and influencers.
Her ability to make people laugh while also reminding them not to buy into the unrealistic standards of the beauty industry has won her 9.6 million fans across the world, including the celebrities she parodies.
“Celeste just flips it all on its head and I love that,” says supermodel and friend Cindy Crawford.
“And I think then it takes the pressure off women to have that perfect Instagram persona all the time.”
Yet Celeste’s hard-won fame was “twenty years in the making”, with the trained actor suffering setbacks, self-doubt and the sudden suicide of her best friend and champion, actor Mark Priestley.
Eventually, it was leaning into the exact qualities that she was once ostracized for that won her an army of supporters, both online and on stages around the world.
While she still grapples with the shadow of her ADHD, Celeste’s success is validation for the young outcast who was constantly being told she was too loud and annoying.
“The reason I’m so proud of her is that she’s just been herself,” says her mother Kath Barber.
“She’s being celebrated just for being her, where she never was.”
Producer: Sarah Grant
