BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

That was a real swing-and-a-miss...

Is Recovery Norway in Denmark or what? Sure, why not? Oops.

 

Yeah I expect it more to be in the form of short interviews, maybe some comments on a panel or a video. Doubt there will be much more of that on Twitter. Just anything that isn't published with formal scientific review.

 

I think that's likely. I've wondered about the super-athletes who have horrible post-viral fatigue for a year and then have a great "recovery"--and if they've been given GET, they attribute it to that and say that's what got them over their CFS or ME.

 

And Professor Chalder is out there already saying that in the posted interview.

 

There is a confusion, even (especially!) among medical people about PVFS. It was a new name for ME which only lasted a short time before we went with the complete CFS.

In the dim distant days of my youth it was taken for granted that some infections could take moths to a couple of years to resolve and we called it a post viral. But there has been a constant and deliberate confusion in the same way as CFS and chronic fatigue.

My husband had a fatiguing illness for about 10 months after a bad flu when he was forced back to work while still ill. We never associated it with my illness though now he would be told he had ME/CFS and recovered.

One of the things Ramsay emphasised is the variability of ME. He said it , I think, in the context of post viral states where the fatigue is constant while ME (and long covid has people who keep thinking they are fine but collapsing again.

Athletes seem to get an overtraining syndrome where they take a working aerobic system beyond its limits, while we have a broken aerobic system which reaches its limit too soon. The symptoms may appear the same but they have different causes so one can resolve with rest.

 

I had this a lot in the first few years. I just couldn't make any sense of it. I often felt fine after resting, but resuming my usual daily activities always led to a relapse. It was very demoralizing.

I don't normally have extreme and constant fatigue. It's mostly mild, but will quickly worsen with activity, and can turn into intense fatigue at some points throughout the day. It also always gets worse with PEM.

 

Sweden: Hanne Kjöller (controversial writer, BPS extremist, background in nursing) attacks people with long-covid in her latest editorial in DN, Sweden's largest daily newspaper. CFS is mentioned.

DN: Coronapandemin får sjuktalen i psykisk ohälsa att minska
https://www.dn.se/ledare/hanne-kjoller-coronapandemin-far-sjuktalen-i-psykisk-ohalsa-att-minska/

Google Translate, English ("The corona pandemic reduces the number of people on sick leave due to mental illness")

The framing/narrative she's using is so called "cultural illnesses" (psychological/emotional/existential/social threats are supposedly "internalised" and expressed as physical symptoms), referring to Karin Johannisson's earlier works.

I find it a very bizarre piece of writing. I think maybe the point she's trying to make (imply) is that "fewer people are currently on sick leave due to mental illness, and more people are on sick leave due to long-covid. Therefore long-covid must be a mental illness"?

She seems to suggest that long-covid is one of many similar disorders (including CFS) that are best managed with "de-dramatization and normalization". Which I guess means comforting reassurances (instead of medical tests etc) in order to dispel patients' "false illness beliefs" and "irrational fears", thereby making the "cultural illness" go away?

There are so many problematic/nonsensical assumptions and misrepresentations of facts here... For example, the fact that fewer people are currently on sick leave due to a mental illness diagnosis, those numbers are from Försäkringskassan/the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and doesn't reflect people's actual health but the number of people who have had their applications for social security payments approved. (According to a recent investigation by Sveriges Radio -- Sweden's national publicly funded radio broadcaster -- the rejections have increased by 70% during the pandemic compared to last year..!)

ARGH!

For context, here's what Wikipedia says about Kjöller:

ETA: DN's Facebook post, in case anyone wants to read the comments.

 

Wow, so chronic pain began to exist in the 90s? Damn, TIL. It was never talked about before, of course. Nope, not ever. Completely new thing, somewhen in the 90's people just began claiming "it hurts" and mass hysteria ensued. Totally. This is SMART.

What I love the most about this is just how obvious this is all projection, these extremists don't seem to understand that other people have different life experiences than they do, that non-health care professionals don't think about things related to health, as is presented here. These are people whose job is to think about those things and they seem to extrapolate that this is what everyone does.

No offense but here's a simple truth about doctors: "ordinary" people don't think about you, ever. It's not a thing. People certainly don't think about doctors as saviors or lifelines or other stuff like that unless they are sick. Literally never. People don't think about hospitals, or medical clinics, or sick people. Not a thing. Nobody likes illness and death and thinking about doctors means thinking about that, hence why this is not a real thing.

This way of thinking reeks of narcissism, these people place themselves at the center of the universe and obsess over what people think of them. Nobody cares, dude. Get over yourselves. You are professionals in your respective field, an important one but one of many, and unless they are sick, people think about doctors exactly as much as they think about chemical engineers or hydrologists. It's just not something relevant to their lives.

Haha you're totally right about that. Nobody was thinking about viruses before 2020. Nobody. This is all brand new stuff that did not exist before January of this year. You are very smart people.

 

May be it seems that way because ME patients have erroneously been placed in to and drowned out by the larger group of Chronic Fatigue.

This is just gaslighting. I was sectioned for having ME and told by staff that I wasn't in pain. Also the psychiatrists told my carers that my illness was "All in my head". You can't blame society's unfair views about mental health on ME patients.

 

One can sort of feel sorry for these people who so badly need to devalue and discredit patients just for having inconvenient health problems.

 

My emphasis

I can't.

 

Indeed. The claim that we have contempt for mental illness is deliberately misleading and continued mentions of "mental illness is real and serious" is just whataboutism.

If they'd actually listen to our point of view, instead of attacking us they'd have a very different impression.

I'd feel pity if not for the fact that they are the ones who have the power to start to listen and improve the situation.

 

Wow shocking attitude Quite some opinion

 

Another Swedish opinion piece, written by 11 BPS doctors...

DN: ”Aktivering är den effektivaste formen av behandling”
Google Translate, English ("Activation is the most effective form of treatment")

 

I suspect that author fundamentally misunderstands the point of medicine/doctors, from a patient's perspective.

 

The one thing of which stupid people are convinced is that what they consider to be generally true is true in every particular case.

 

I'm not a particularly vengeful person, I have better uses for my energy, but reading that piece it occurred to me to hope karma exists.

 

"Why do these people keep coming to me with their symptoms?", said the very weird doctor.

Seriously, why do people keep going to the mechanic with car problems? What's up with that?

Why do customer service representatives have to deal with complaints from customers? What's up with that? Can't they just accept to live with their problems?

I would suggest an experiment: let's give those people chronic low-grade nausea. I'm sure that can be done safely. Just non-stop nausea. It's just a small symptom. Nothing threatening, nothing that can't be shrugged off, just stop thinking about it and it won't have any effect. I'm sure they will totally just go on with their normal life as if nothing was happening. Totally. Absolutely. Then let's go boating. Let's have a heavy meal made entirely of meat, let's have the meat sweats, then let's go dancing. What's wrong? Are you having unhelpful illness beliefs that the nausea is a signal of something actually serious?

Seriously is there some major disconnect over what symptoms are? They're not just some "check engine" light where you see the light before the problem manifests itself. It seems like there is a huge missing component in medical training, I don't get how it's possible to undergo this much training and so fundamentally misunderstand this stuff.

 

Do these people know that morbidity is still a thing despite exercise also being a thing? Even in people who do actually exercise? Hello?

Seriously that makes no sense whatsoever, they argue that there is an easy universal cure for all morbidity, therefore morbidity should not exist. Except it obviously does. So what the hell? This is completely delusional. How does it make sense that such irrational people have power of life and death over vulnerable people? Something's completely broken here.