I'm not disagreeing with this but I find it to be a very vague statement. I know nothing about any of this but it occurs to me to wonder are we talking about an acute stress of say fleeing a gunman in a building?
If the person experiencing that does not return to normal as expected after the threat is over does that necessitate a psychological explanation or is there the possibility that something physical was not quite working properly and when all ones friends and colleagues go back to normal one's system once overwhelmed gets stuck through no psychological effect at all?
If this is the case I would think that anyone observing the person might identify what they see (the physical broken response) as psychological symptoms.
I don't expect you to have the answers here
@boolybooly just throwing some thoughts out as regards this idea.
There is no doubt it needs study and experimentation for ME.
Wondering what kinds of mistakes psychologists can make to foul up the treatment of ME even more goes beyond useful speculation IMHO. The point would be not to make mistakes, in particular not jumping to conclusions about causal relationships between stress and ME.
What we know about stress and immune activity makes it seem logically possible that stress could reveal immune dysfunction by suppressing the immune system long enough for a pathogen to gain the upper hand. I think its common knowledge that stress can exacerbate existing conditions. People usually bounce back, only end of life scenarios where fragile people are pushed over the edge.
With ME there is also no bouncing back for some reason we dont understand but it is rarely killing people directly, just shortening life expectancy by decades. PWME need to be treated with the same kindness we should show to the very elderly, because such kindness, which people of good conscience practice instinctively, is a way of reducing stress.
Regarding stress, FYI, as I understand it from my zoology degree and teacher training (lecture ahead!), at least two well known hormones mediate stress on the immune system. Broadly speaking cortisol handles state changes like waking up etc and adrenalin responds to cognitively anticipated demand for energy when planning activity.
They both suppress the immune system because they shunt metabolic energy away from immunity, growth and digestion into muscles and nerves to fuel activity, that is their purpose. We evolved this diurnal circadian system to allocate different physiological activity to different times of the day because it helps us use 100% of available energy at times of challenge or healing.
Getting up in the morning is sufficient stress to affect the immune system, cortisol levels typically rise in the morning as a natural function of the circadian rhythm suppressing use of metabolic energy for healing, shunting it into activity.
Healthy people typically dont notice this kind of stress and take it for granted and even feel good for it, but this may be why some PWME find it much harder to get up in the morning than those without ME and have to go very gently. Which is not trivial, it is a difficult reality easily mistaken for laziness. Dr Paul Cheney is on record as saying PWME typically have low cortisol and behave as you would expect for this situation, they cannot focus mentally or remember stuff or handle complexity. I dont know if everyone with ME finds this but it matches my experience and I have read many accounts from other people saying likewise aka brain fog.
PWME often cannot take stress which other people take in their stride or even enjoy. Another example is "friendly" social interaction. This is IMHO typically a significant stressor due to factors which we can understand from a perspective of social behaviour and its evolution. Social behaviour is evolutionarily important for reproduction, so we evolved to put energy into it and this activates pleasant "stress" hormone release (adrenalin) which causes happy excitement and yet in so doing shunts energy away from the immune system and digestion. This may be why social interaction tends to be unusually taxing for PWME and PWME run the risk of coming across as sociopathic which would be a mistaken interpretation of our plight.
I do not think ME is stress induced but I think stress makes it worse because I know my own ME is due to an immune dysfunction with real pathogens vying to take advantage of it all the time.
I think a lot of "experts" really do not understand the way the illness affects us and project all kinds of monsters from their own id onto us because this condition lays us lower than most human beings would ever want to go, particularly in regard to the social dimension because of the way this affects communication and mutual comprehension.
It is their fear and ignorance of themselves which manifests as such idiocy as we see in BPS and LP and AR despite their conceited hypocrisy regarding their own self awareness. i.e. they claim to be super self aware ubermensch and they are not, but then people often teach what they most need to learn, myself included
