I'm making what may be a doomed attempt over the next 8 months to complete the masters degree I've been on a leave of absence from for 4 years. I have to write a "capstone" (a short dissertation), and I've chosen to write it on Long Covid and ME. I'm going to have a brief overview of the history of ME. What are the best both published and unpublished books and papers on this? So far, I have Hillary Johnson's two books, A Town for People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the New Yorker, Thirty Years of Disdain (an unpublished but very good manuscript) alongside shorter sources like ME/CFS Skeptic's excellent blog. I realise this is a broad question, and for this section of the capstone I'll be working primarily from secondary sources - so any suggestions would be very helpful. Given I'm writing it while being on the severe end of moderate, it's not going to be the most impressive or rigorous piece of work, but my intention is to come back to it when I'm stronger and make it publishable.
I'm particularly interested in articles and books on the history of the biopsychosocial model - I've found a lot more written on the American side of the history than the rise and fall of the more European (and UK) based biopsychosocial model
The Rise and Fall of the Psychosomatic Approach to Medically Unexplained Symptoms, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by David Marks Article | Thread Blog series: "Orthodoxy on trial: the pathogenesis of a diagnosis" by David Black
If you want a section on challenges to the BPS ideology, Brian Hughes' The Science Bit is a good place to look. The site also has some interesting thoughts on scientific literacy generally. https://thesciencebit.net/
Joanne Hunt has published a lot of stuff in this vein. More focusing on structural, social, and political issues, but also often touching on the history. Her google scholar
Film: The Tangled Story of ME/CFS From @Valerie Eliot Smith's blog: https://valerieeliotsmith.com/category/the-secret-files/ if you want to dig further about some secret files.
Simon Wessely has a website with a range of papers he was involved in, some of which might be relevant to the history of the biopsychosocial model e.g. there is a 1990 paper called Old Wine in New Bottles about neurasthenia and ME https://simonwessely.com/papers-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/
For the UK, key names that should come up in the story are Simon Wessely, Peter White, Michael Sharpe, Trudie Chalder, Esther Crawley. Also, in relation to denial of disabilty support for pwME, Waddell and Aylward. Links with the insurance industry, the Science Media Centre, The Oxford definition that redefined ME as CFS and only required chronic fatigue, and included fatigue caused by depression and anxiety. The conference and publication where this was decided. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1293107/pdf/jrsocmed00127-0072.pdf
You might find Solve ME's CFIDS Chronicle, a newsletter they published from the late 80s to 2010s, to be useful. I've been collecting and digitizing old issues and just finished another set yesterday. I'm up to 66 issues at ~3500 pages, from 1988 to 2007, of the Chronicle and a smaller mid-2000s publication Solve produced called CFS Research Review. I've compiled them all into a couple large PDFs to make it easy to search the lot: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12nqHs37qT2MsOfQ727mTYROvD7Rn91wf?usp=share_link Incidentally, if anyone has any issues that I don't have that they would like to send me, I would be grateful. I could return once digitized. I would also be interested in other materials that are at risk of loss that anyone thinks are worthy of preservation, whether print materials, photographs, audio/video recordings, or other items. After HHS removed most of the CFSAC meeting videos from Youtube this year, I'm trying to gather and digitize some of the more fragile portions of our history.
I bought that book with great hope that it would be really good. It was awful. Muddled and badly written.
This was a really useful collection of Wessely quotes, complete with clickable links to references for the publications each of them came from: https://www.s4me.info/threads/simon-wessely-research-related-quotes.1304/ . So you might find some helpful papers or books within the references.
This is so incredibly helpful!! Thank you so much @Yann04 @Trish @Kitty @EzzieD @Mfairma @NelliePledge @Arnie Pye @Theresa @Sly Saint
https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...social-model/A31DAA3BED6569F6080A1DF2C1D15A64 I found this more general historical look at the biospychosocial model by S Nassir Ghaemi 2018 very interesting. This article by Drs Weir and Speight is brief, putting the recent psychosocial dogma in a historical perspective. https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/9/8/984
Don't forgot to mention that ME was hijacked twice (3 times if you count the so far unsuccessful redefining of ME as PEM). In 1970 ME was redefined as hysteria then in the late 1980s it was rebranded CFS by the BPS brigade with the focus upon fatigue rather than what Melvin Ramsay originally described.
You might want to look at my Qeis article. For me ME is a defunct concept that was always too muddled to be useful. Basically a confusion of two quite different concepts. Sadly, much of the literature criticising the BPS model is as muddled as the BPS people are, and only serves to perpetuate the confusion.
