Therapist Perspective: Dan Wyke

Dolphin · May 3, 2025

Dan Wyke - a therapist's perspective

Dan Wyke (a person-centred counsellor from the South of England) reflects on his experiences as a therapist and person with MECFS.

He shares ideas and suggestions for both people with #MECFS and also therapists who work with them.

Amongst other things, I asked Dan 'what sort of things can you ask a therapist at an introductory meeting to reassure yourself about their level of understanding?'

read the interview with Dan Wyke
https://chroniclivingtherapy.com/dan-wyke-interview/

https://twitter.com/user/status/1918671489924038830

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Dolphin · May 3, 2025

Small error:

A few years after I qualified as a counsellor, I developed ME/CFS and quickly became aware that most patients, although seriously ill, don’t feel understood or even believed by their GP. Worse still, the year after I qualified, The Lancet published the highly flawed PACE Trial which ultimately led to NICE recommending graded exercise therapy (GET) – even though exercise is potentially harmful to patients suffering from Post-exertional malaise (PEM) – and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) – to cure patients, the researchers claimed, of the “unhelpful beliefs” which perpetuate patients’ symptoms.
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The NICE guidelines recommending GET and CBT came out before the PACE Trial results came out.

Utsikt · May 3, 2025

Dolphin said: ↑

Small error:

The NICE guidelines recommending GET and CBT came out before the PACE Trial results came out.
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Other countries have recommended GET and CBT based on PACE, so I’ll just pretend he’s talking about those!

Hutan · May 4, 2025

Tom Kindlon said:

Comment: I liked this. I was going to share extracts but I think it's all good.
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I liked this too. I will share a couple of extracts although I too felt there was a lot worth sharing:

Otherwise perfectly competent counsellors can be surprisingly dogmatic about what they think contributes to good health or assists in the management of most physical health conditions, even when they don’t have any relevant medical training to back this up. But these ideas just don’t apply to ME/CFS and will very quickly alienate clients who have ME/CFS. If a counsellor is going to develop a genuinely therapeutic relationship with a client with ME/CFS, they need to weed out thinking that they know what’s best for their client and undertake to learn everything they know about the condition from them. For some reason people are very attached to ideas about health and they can be extremely hard to uproot. That’s partly why a specialist directory of counsellors is needed.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, an increase in the number of people meeting diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS has brought about some improvement in attitudes towards infection-associated chronic illness among counsellors – not least because many have been affected themselves. Even so there’s still a tendency among counsellors to practice beyond their medical competence and misguidedly recommend treatments which are from the the wellness industry and aren’t supported by research.

What’s needed is a major effort by the profession’s regulatory bodies, like the BACP, to ensure members aren’t practicing outside of their competency and are aware of the updated NICE guidelineswhich explicitly state GET should not be offered as a treatment for ME/CFS and CBT should only be offered to patients who want it to help them adapt to living with a life-changing medical condition.
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People with ME/CFS contact me for all sorts of reasons but all of them have experienced disbelief and gaslighting by a health professional at some point in their illness. Sometimes years, and in some cases, decades of disbelief has left them doubting their own experience. They want to be believed and to feel validated. The harm caused by gaslighting by medical professionals is real and profound. It’s immensely hard for patients to live in a world that doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of individuals’ illness and suffering. Not only can it lead to dangerous neglect but it can also cause patients to question their own sense of reality. Clients describe it as a form of mental torture.
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NelliePledge · May 6, 2025

I sent a link to my counsellor (also a practitioner of person centred counselling) she said she agrees with everything Dan wrote.

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Therapist Perspective: Dan Wyke

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