BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

Then they should be very supportive of research into these illnesses.

 

Maybe we could get Piers Morgan to set him straight "Look Tucker, if this didn't happen to me, I would believe the same thing..."

From Wikipedia:
"In April 2020, Carlson's program surpassed Hannity as the highest-rated primetime cable news show, with an average audience of 4.56 million viewers. During the second quarter of 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight garnered an average audience of 4.33 million viewers, the largest for any program in the history of cable news."

 

I think this ranks alongside Rod Liddle. If they were pro ME I would begin to wonder if we had been wrong all along!

 

Most-watched cable "news" show in the US, by a wide margin. But this is an audience that denies the entire pandemic, so they wouldn't care anyway. It's manufactured outrage but actually pretty much serves as a gauge of the right side of history: these people are consistently wrong about everything. Especially that Berenson dude.

Somehow the Long Covid deniers aren't too concerned at being on the same side as trolls and people who are consistently wrong about everything. But the trolls have always been on this wrong side of the issue, over the years they often spoke exactly the same way as the BPS ideologues.

It just sucks that the right side of history takes a long time to take place.

 

John Oliver's show about Tucker Carlsen:

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

 

Long Covid is ‘urgent’ issue with ‘lingering psychological effects’
Anxiety and depression found among people after Covid infection, study finds
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and...ith-lingering-psychological-effects-1.4756067

 

Here the BPS, British Psychological Society, tries to argue for the problem, the BPS model, as a solution to the problems created by the BPS model. Very poorly, this appears to be someone with LC but clearly a very mild case, as it speaks of LC stopping people from doing the things they love.

Awful and meandering, completely naïve of reality and context. Also seemingly unaware that LC has been handled from a BPS perspective and that's exactly the problem. It's literally proposing the current problem as a solution to itself. Amazing, you couldn't make this up outside of satire.


We need to talk about Long-Covid
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/we-need-talk-about-long-covid

 

The Norwegian Directorate of Health announced on Facebook today that they have collected some tools and courses that can be useful for those who suffer from after effects of Corona.

They link to an official, public site about health which says to deliver updated information of high quality.

The title of the page is: Get help in coping with your everyday life after corona

Here's the list they've gathered:

- Stress and unease (with a link to a digital self help program for stress)
- Anxiety (with some videos with self help programmes for anxiety)
- Sleeping difficulties (with videos of selv help programmes for sleep difficulties)
- Depression (with a video and link to the self help programme iFightDepression)
- Other digital self help tools (with links to an app called Go Me, an app to encourage daily walks of 10 minutes and an app to help people stop smoking)

 

When half-assing massively overstates the effort. If only it was half an ass of an effort, it wouldn't look nearly as pitiful.

Strong "graphic design is my passion" vibes coming out of this place.

 

this is the best approach with Tucker Carlson.

 

4.3 million viewers is a tiny fraction of the US adult population of about 210 million. It's pretty close to 1 in 50 adults.

When The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite was on in the 1970's, it pulled in about 30 million viewers back when the US adult population was considerably less. This was largely due to the limited number of national news broadcasts at the time.

I guess I'm just saying that all of the current crop of cable news shows would have been cancelled for low ratings in a previous era. I think their influence today is vastly overestimated.

 

A Swedish parody/gallows humour Twitter account:

"The Cultural Clinic", "We are here to help people recover from cultural illnesses" (ie Long covid, ME etc.)

https://twitter.com/kulturkliniken

 

Dr. Khan is looking for journal articles regarding minimising Long Covid.

 

I've noticed a few dubious-looking accounts popping up on sites like Reddit promoting this website:

Long covid cured

It features a few anecdotes from people (eg, Paul Garner) claiming to have beaten Long Covid. They credit dubious mind-body quackery including Recovery Norway, the placebo effect and John Sarno.

There is no information on it as to who is responsible for the site as far as I can see. A whois search just says that it's based in the Netherlands.

I wonder if it is connected to people running similar sites. It does seem to very similar to others that promote mind-body nonsense for ME/CFS.

 

It's weird that the GPs like this have got that far in reading the papers they push out on placebo effect (a BPS favourite), and on reading the rubbish wastepapers on BPS et associates' 'treatments' based on unblinded controls and subjective measures (just like the placebos in the 'placebo/nocebo'), but almost there - ooh noticed the 'benefit was about the same significance as they get in their nocebo/placebo demos' but not quite far enough not to be REALLY STUPID as a conclusion 'you'll get a nice placebo effect'. I'd hope it was a wry joke but fear people don't see the truth in their own words.

Or ... the people who run trials of this design when they are v conflicted maybe maximise all the little factors of persuasion, BBF and marking schemes to produce 'trial effects' . Like why in business they don't get the customer service person you just spoke to doing their own 'how was the service today' survey down the phone. Why can't we just take the coefficient and studies from the business literature on this sort of thing and use it to ban then marking their own homework?

Particularly when you add in the testimony e.g. for the PACE trial of those who counted as recovered but by objective measures using one's eyes ended up in wheelchairs having walked in. But they don't use these measures because 'it would be too hard' for the poor investigators.

 

The brainwashing seems to have gone so far (by making most medical professionals say 'the mind affects body' to refer them off on a pathway so many times a day I assume indoctrination of the sayer occurs where they assume they believe and understand it) that even established professionals now seem to believe that nothing else causes elevated heart rate than it being from the amygdala. Stress can't be 'on the body' either. It's frightening when you think about the rewriting of basic biology involved there and how much is having to get adjusted in their heads to reach cognitive coherence from dissonance on heart attacks vs panic attacks vs adrenal crises vs anaphylactic shock vs RTAs and so on.

 

Yep the anxiety idea is always a laugh. Even in the most stressful of times when you actually need to think about things or give yourself time to stress the body just carks out eventually like when you can't finish watching a film from exhaustion - it's the one illness that it would be hard to end up in some drawn out anxiety with, as you say - would get in the way of really embedding anything in firmly when you have to schedule in your catch up pass-out sleep. Of course sadly the 'wired' when you've had to push through your baseline (what I call the 'overdrive that gets me home when I've got myself stranded, but leaves me ill for ages') is misconstrued by onlookers - don't know how they can't see the difference because it is basically just cognitive fatigue so you can't speak well combined with empty energy that sadly means you try and speak (and make yourself more tired and wired).

 

Long read in the Guardian focussing on Body Politic and Long Covid efforts/psychologization/gaslighting. Author has ME/CFS.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/03/long-covid-fight-recognition-gaslighting-pandemic

"Though they had no way of knowing it at the time, members of the Body Politic were among the nation’s first “longhaulers” – and their condition was initially met with intense doubt from many. After all, the coronavirus was supposed to be a flu-like virus that subsided in a matter of days, with the worst cases lasting perhaps two weeks.

Suffering from symptoms for longer was to be wading into uncharted territory, one that started evoking questions about stress, psychological health and personal credibility...

“It was just a shitshow for I don’t even remember how long,” Davis said. At one point, Davis received a dyspeptic, borderline deranged email divulging personal information about her – including her middle name – that she’d never put online. “There is nothing more obvious than the fact that you have Munchausen syndrome,” the message read. “Your symptoms are made up and are mentally ill derived! If you don’t stop this behavior in a very reasonable amount of time then I’m going to have you committed to a mental institution.”

Others were drawn to invoking irrepressible old tropes about the chronically ill, including accusing Davis and the PLRC of seeking to profit from a fictitious condition. “Long Covid is a scam just like Lyme, chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue,” one tweet read. “Grifters are pushing this and millions of dollars will be made.”

During the demoralizing weeks-long conflagration, Davis and her colleagues learned that there are people who were angry, even personally offended that they were sick – a kind of medical gaslighting by way of internet mob mentality."

... “I think it needs to get to a point where it’s recognizable by people, and people aren’t suffering in the dark like this.” - Hannah Davis

 

Chronic illness is a toxic issue, but it was never the patients who made it so.

Contrast this to the ridiculous handful of tweets the BPS ideologues presented as evidence of harassment (which they then admitted is not even an issue, what they really complain about is all official and proper stuff like NICE and correcting their errors), even as they try to get people fired and punished behind the scenes. This will be one of the most disgusting aspect of this nightmare, the sheer mass of contempt and hatred they unleashed on us, whining the whole time about how they are the real victims.