BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

Let me guess, one of the sure signs that you're suffering PTSD and not actual biological illness is that you don't believe what you're suffering is PTSD.

Always never amazing that someone in psychology is so very concerned for people's well-being that they must make psychology the answer. Rescued again from the evil clutches of actual medicine. Oh joy.

 

Won't they have fun discovering all about Abnormal Illness Behaviour?

 

Wow, the PI seems to really think his trial is "fully blinded". What is his understanding of blinding?

And this is "How will we know if the treatment helps":

"How will we know if the treatment helps?

"We have spoken to people recovering from COVID-19 and their families. They told us that less shortness of breath, tiredness and worry, along with more confidence and better health are important. They also told us that they are worried about how slow their recovery has been and that there has been little support to help them get back to a normal life.

"We will ask people to fill in quality of life questionnaires a over 12 months. This will help us to find out if our supervised, on-line, exercise and support programme does or does not help people recovering from COVID-19 and if it represents good value for the NHS."

https://fundingawards.nihr.ac.uk/award/NIHR132046

I think this is an example par excellence of how the concept of patient involvement in clinical trials and studying outcomes that allegedley matter most to patients can be misused to circumvent any sound trial methodology: No need to include also objective measures as primary endpoints (edit: based on cherry-picking from what patients said.)

How did this get funding?

@Jonathan Edwards @Caroline Struthers @dave30th
@Hilda Bastian @PhysiosforME

 

Yep, they set the bar high with Positive Attitudes Change Everything. Though they did have some trouble getting the actual components to fit: Pacing, graded exercise therapy Activity, and Cognitive behaviour therapy; a randomised trial Evaluation.

 

I sent Jonathan Edwards Scottish Government inquiry submission to McGregor. He replied and said he would share it with colleagues, but it's not enough.

 

Not to mention False Illness Beliefs, FIBs for short.

 

Good to see that in these days of difficulty for public transport the gravy train, at least, is fully operational.

 

This appears to be a self-gaslighting episode by... the director of the Cochrane Sustainable Healthcare group. Incredible. The doublethink and obvious cognitive dissonance at reconciling a delusional worldview with a personal experience that invalidates it is... fascinating. This person hurts themselves in confusion. Doesn't necessarily show from parts I quoted but the author has Long Covid.


Minna Johansson: Caring for patients with long covid—a compassionate tightrope

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/10/0...ts-with-long-covid-a-compassionate-tightrope/

I have no idea how those thoughts are reconciled. It's widely known that developing treatments is always based on trying to address a step in whatever pathways cause the disease state. Other than out of sheer luck, I don't think it's ever happened for an effective treatment to be developed without targeting the cause. Really bizarre. It is precisely to make treatments available that we do research. It is how it literally always works.

This is genuinely the first time I have seen the imaginary thought bubbles invented by BPS charlatans actually be expressed by a patient. Fascinating that those fake dialogues have been so internalized that even though they are utterly fake, this person cannot do anything but think about them, only because it is a popular trope from the physician side of things, not because it is relevant to the patient's needs.

It is not, in fact, sensible. It is, in fact, actually very silly. We know for a fact that this model is completely unrealistic from an economic perspective. It is massively expensive, on top of not delivering a damn thing. Anything that delivers nothing is always too expensive, but this is massively expensive.

These internal dialogues exist only in the mind of psychosomatic ideologues who think about this stuff for a living but lack a personal understanding.

This is frankly sad and actually feels abusive. What an incredible waste this ideology has created.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1314615377478004739

 

Looks like Henrik Vogt was the second person she followed on twitter:

 

Well presumably it is that people could not notice the difference between a single session and an eight week course.

It could be tricky I guess, if you had brain fog?

Sometimes I wish I tweeted, but only for very short periods. Otherwise I am very glad I don't.

 

We don't know but I question the assumption being made that ancient societies had a better understanding than we do.

My interpretation is that the author appears to believe that she can explain them. She appears to believe that society prefers to think of psychosomatic symptoms as being unexplained.

It leads people like the author to grasping for explanations instead of saying I don't know?

Who knows. Maybe it's our aspiration to find meaning in everything, even awful illness, that is problematic.

No thank you, I prefer to see awful diseases prevented and cured.

 

Ptsd has undergone a horrible transformation of recent years. It used to be a specific disorder caused by extreme out of the norm life ending events, soldiers at war, men from the piper alpha disaster. Then suddenly I noticed this year that every man and his dog has been given this diagnosis. From an celebrity who had a slightly shitty childhood, to a man who is gay (apparently it causes horrific trauma). This is life, this is not what ptsd used to be. I wonder who's benefiting from the massive widening of the criteria.

 

A couple of hours later...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1314679313502007297


https://twitter.com/user/status/1314672244237512708

 

Great reply @strategist I was inclined to respond WT-/WTH when I read the material you quoted --- like the comments from some dude on mind altering substances (never got to parties like that myself) --- good for a laugh though!

 

How can a person possibly think that we need to focus less on understanding the causes of long covid? It sounds crazy, but it sort of makes sense if she believes that she already has the answer. Presumably for her, long covid is psychosomatic symptoms that are really caused by stress, which aren't recognized as such.

 

I think the new term is called "professional victim".

 

From what I understand, complex ptsd (cptsd) became a diagnosis for some yrs.

It refers to patients that didn't have one big trauma (like being in a warzone) but several "smaller" ones over a long time, e.g. victims of domestic violence.

I don't know how established it is and what the difference between cptsd, depression and anxiety would be.

But if "cptsd" in any way helps people to get their specific trauma reaction addressed, I don't think it's a bad thing to have widened the criteria.

BUT this has nothing to do with LongCovid for me. I dread it's going to be a cheap excuse to not put money into biomedocal research.

 

I can't speak for Ninna Jonansson but I have met this kind of attitude before both from a family member and outside family. Particularly some ME patients I met in the early years and also online.

Without any investigations or desire to investigate any physical or other causes of health problems, some are all too willing to go down this stress or psychological trauma route.

Rather than actually fix the problem some seem to revel in it. As though it confers some kind of status, makes the special in some way. They are more sensitive, have been under more stress than everyone else.

I've seen it used to try to manipulate the people around them.

I find it fascinating that this is exactly the argument that the BPS cabal have used against those of us who insist on searching for an effective treatment or cure - we are accused of wanting the status of being sick, victimhood absolving us of our responsibilities. Yet in my experience it's the fellow patients who cling to the BPS view who have seemed happiest to do just that.

Please note - this comment is not about those suffering mental ill health but a specific group of patients who may very well have a physical or biomedical cause of their poor health but refuse to look for it.