BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

It's NTB - The Norwegian News Agency that's behind the article. They are considered very trustworthy. I thought at first it was a local newspaper, but they've only republished it. As have a news site about research and probably others..

 

"Mental health of coronavirus sufferers is being ignored, Royal College of Psychiatrists warns"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...lege-psychiatrists-adrian-james-b1253895.html
I hope this is not off-topic as it's apparently not psychologizing longcovid away. However, the RCP now claims that more psychiatric involvement in covid19 is urgently needed, because of neurological effects of the virus, long term anxiety and depression etc.

 

Well they would say that wouldnt they?

Though I do agree that realistic psychology could be useful but that is undermined by the fools who overreach their remit like the PACE gang.

Which is why *plug* we need to fund Dr David Tuller PhD to keep an eye on them all. (Just 4 days to go and $15k to raise, so its looking a bit close.)

https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/22602

He cant do it all but its important to put down a marker and draw a line in the sand to catalyse change.

Maybe in fighting the good fight we can find allies within the field of psychology, like Prof Leonard Jason, who will help us put the loonies back in their box and provide genuinely beneficial psychological services for people with ME and longcovid who have direct neurological affects from the illness as well as the inevitable psychological trauma resulting from chronic illness.

They just need to reverse and abandon the disastrous idiocy which claims the disease is due to the trauma it creates.

 

Same issue, different disease.

Medium-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection on multiple vital organs, exercise capacity, cognition, quality of life and mental health, post-hospital discharge
To quote my response in https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.15.20205054v1#disqus_thread

"This studies depression measure ASSUMES A HEALTHY PATIENT. 'little energy', 'trouble concentrating' 'moving slowly' = a minimum score of 3 due to physical symptoms of longcovid/fatigue.
If very exhausted, this can easily rise into the 'severely depressed' range.
https://patient.info/doctor/patient-health-questionnaire-phq-9

It is not unreasonable to use the PHQ-9 or similar as a screening measure of disease severity.

To use it in a patient population suffering from fatigue, concentration problems, ... is guaranteed to cross-read between those symptoms and anxiety - it is useless without a careful assessment of each question.

It absolutely cannot justify sentances such as 'A significant proportion of COVID-19 patients discharged from hospital experience ongoing symptoms of breathlessness, fatigue, anxiety,
depression and exercise limitation at 2-3 months ' without much more work, as it will lead to the conclusion that treating depression may benefit the patient when there is no depression, and it's a scale artifact."

I followed up in an email with the above, and the below to the studies apparent lead author BettyRaman.

The public relations text and claims made around this article feature depression commonly as they are the easy to understand apparent outcomes.

Specifically, to justify this claim you would need to look carefully at the physical symptoms, and come up with appropriate depression scores for each cohort of physical disability.

Can you attempt to get this corrected, both in the PR and in the published article.

ps. I suffer from an energy limiting physical condition. The bald use of mental health screening instruments without accounting for their crosssensitivity to physical health issues is offensive and has caused significant patient harm due to people attempting to treat a fatigued population as depressed. It has also polluted guideline development and the literature. PHQ9 and other instruments are frequently used without careful thought.

Please help fix this in small part.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1321099009818320897



Also.

The last thing we need is more ammo for BPS/... to claim people with physical conditions are anxious based on misreading scales.
More carefully thought out comments addressing issues with the scale used on the above medrxiv link and likes/... might be helpful to push this up a big.

 

Opinion piece by an orthopaedist, published in the journal of the Swedish Medical Association.

Läkartidningen: Apropå! Stressreflexer och covid-19-symtom
https://lakartidningen.se/opinion/debatt/2020/10/apropa-stressreflexer-och-covid-19-symtom/

 

Stress is triggered in these cases (as in the case of whiplash injury, the Gulf War syndrome [2] and other symptom diagnoses) by the individual being exposed to a death threat but surviving. [...]

Really? My wife and I have both been exposed to death threat but surviving more than once. I have a sore knee but I don't have Long Covid or GWI. I have looked after hundreds of people who were dying but fortunately we managed to get sorted - whether cancer, septicaemia, myocardial infarction, vasculitis or whatever. None of them developed Long whatever. Yes, people in terrible circumstances can get PTSD or shell shock or whatever, but being ill with a potentially mortal disease by and large isn't terrible circumstances. By and large you get looked after - as the Covid patients have.

But then who would ask an orthopaedist about anything other than carpentry?

 

A MD PhD replies on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1321528487816081410


Edited to add one more

https://twitter.com/user/status/1321543939934085128

 

Speakers:
Anthony Fauci, James Brent, Peter Shapiro.
https://myemail.constantcontact.com...ssion.html?soid=1102670834514&aid=AOTaQzkkLZ4

https://twitter.com/user/status/1316781664413114373


eta:
ACLP President Michael Sharpe on attending CLP 2020

Code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7ivB4y9S6o

comments are open

 

Cue snouts in troughs.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322128572732026880

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322129175428452352

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322130010782736384

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322130576359464960

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322131566785605632

 

Moved post

Medscape article: https://reference.medscape.com/viewarticle/937400

"Beyond the long-term physical effects, the lasting psychological impact of COVID-19 has been given a name: coronaphobia. Although the term is a catch-all for the anxieties and concerns experienced in reaction to the pandemic, researchers have formalized a definition of the long-term mental health effects. Recent literature suggests that coronaphobia is more likely among those who feel vulnerable to disease, are predisposed to anxiety, or struggle with uncertainty.

 

But we already have a term for those who are vulnerable to coronavirus, who are 'anxious' about the effects, and who are uncertain as to what will happen.

We call them 'the living'.

We also have a terms for those who are not concerned, who have no anxiety about how coronavirus will affect their lives, the lives of those they care about, their ability to pay a mortgage, etc - one suitable term would be 'idiots'.

(It should be noted that I have forgotten the medical definitions of words like 'idiot', 'moron', etc. - I used to know the differences but not any more, so I am using the generally accepted meaning rather than the medical one)

 

I think the new term is "COVIDIOTS".

 

Source Urban Dictionary.

TOP DEFINITION:

Covidiot
Relating to the 2020 Covid-19 virus:
Someone who ignores the warnings regarding public health or safety.
A person who hoards goods, denying them from their neighbors.
Did you see that covidiot with 300 rolls of toilet paper in his basket?
That covidiot is hugging everyone she sees.

 

I can't help but notice the immense overlap in thinking, sorry I mean "thinking", and rhetoric between this and young Earth creationists. Identical vibe.

"Teach the controversy". "Just asking questions". Any observer would quickly notice that Henrik doesn't actually say anything specific here, is just vague and basically mysterious. Never makes any actual point.

Though it's ironic that he's right that Greenhalgh is making the same mistakes, just not the ones he thinks of, actually the exact opposite of that. What a sad dope. It's going to be a huge shock to these charlatans when they realize just how much this patient population hates them. They've been too insulated in their circle jerk to see it. Ideological thought bubbles are always toxic.

 

In one of his recent talks, Ed Yong spoke of the problem of how the pandemic creates "expert" opportunists. Wish I had the quote, because I think he also said something of how this is at the expense of the real expertise.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322992358061998085

 

and you'd know that how, exactly?

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322996788270452743

 

Again, very odd that a professor who has been a prominent "expert" on the topic, who spent much of his career writing and "researching", has in fact written numerous books, chapters and papers, only has a small bit of vague (and very grammatically-challenged) platitude on the topic for which they have successfully implemented their model the world over.

He can't get into specifics. Just a vague nonsensical "you are wrong and stupid for being wrong".

Because I would very much love for them to go into specifics, for the Long Covid folks to hear what they actually mean. Which they never do, of course, always just vague priest-like pronouncements that they know better and everyone who thinks otherwise is dumb.

Please do. Say it. I'm sure some of you are reading this. Say what you mean in full detail so the Long Covid folks can hear it. Go on. Not vague Deepak Chopra-level koans, say your sciencey stuff, your theoretical framework, your assumptions, your model, your evidence.

They won't. Ever. They know it's indefensible. And so they never do. Cowards. After all those years being "silenced", and yet they still don't say a damn word about what they mean, because they know it's nonsense.

I do love that Sharpe has probably not even read what he is commenting on. Otherwise he would have noticed the lungs thing, which is very hard to argue has no direct relationship to pathology. And yet he did, unknowingly. Because they just say stuff and expect everyone to believe them, as has been happening for decades. They can't actually argue any of their stuff because it depends on people not caring about the specifics.