'Believe ME' | BBC Horizon, 27 June 1988

very much so

 

Yesterday I learned that sertraline affects endothelial function. The truth is that we really don't understand well how anti-depressants work, particularly SSRIs. They can have a strange array of effects. For example, fluvoxamine has possible anti-viral and anti-inflammatory effects and was used to treat covid.

 

The interview with McEvedy at 19:12 was galling. I transcribed it for those that won't be able to watch:

Colin McEvedy: “It did seem that there was a selective effect in this epidemic, which meant that the segregated populations of females were much more vulnerable, and that’s something we found when we looked at comparable epidemics, that this cluster of symptoms which characterized this illness seemed to occur when there were outbreaks in institutions where females were the predominant population, and then they spread through the female population, but tended to spare the bits of the population that were male or mixed.”

Interviewer: “Why should that be?”

McEvedy: “Why should females be more liable to get this sort of propagating anxiety? Well, I mean I suppose the simple answer is they’re much nicer than men and they are much more sympathetic to other people’s problems and instead of saying, 'Well, what are you going to do with that,' they feel a rush of sympathy and identification with somebody who is in trouble and who’s ill and who’s hurting.

Narrator: “Why should the fact that women are more sympathetic by nature make them more liable to illness, real or simulated?”

McEvedy: “Women are more prone to ask for help directly, and they’re more prone, I think, to ask for it in these indirect ways. There are more women in doctor’s surgery. There are certainly more women in a psychiatric clinic, always, two to one usually. And when it comes to feeling ill, I think women do have a lower threshold for feeling ill and for translating their anxiety into physical symptoms."

 

It doesn't even make sense

So prone to directly and prone to indirectly!!!

 

Excellent, ! I've been looking for this for years!