BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

https://twitter.com/user/status/1396157333181509636


Why, yes indeed, being made to stay at home and missing out going to the pub is literally equivalent to being subject to weeks-long artillery fire in trench warfare. Totally checks out. Shmart analysis.

Good classics never die, I guess. Why specifically use the old discredited term? Maybe because throwing a good old dead cat on the table works every time.

 

With the BPS cabal having spent the past year using every opportunity to opine in public that people are suffering from having to be isolated -- well how do they know they are not causing all this suffering by endlessly pointing it out?

Seems to me there's a double standard here.

 

Can't have double standards if you have no standards.

Although yeah the same people were saying how much worse the lockdowns were and how suicides would be through the roof and they actually went down but nobody seems to have concluded that maybe people who are wrong about everything make for lousy advisors and we should just stop paying attention to them entirely.

 

From what I've seen of Wesseley's work, he liked to examine and refer to history a lot, often with the implication that different conditions like Shell Shock were cultural illnesses of their time. I expect Prof Sharpe is thinking along similar lines here.

I can see why that sort of thinking is appealing. It synthesizes history with medicine and some philosophical thinking, whilst having practical application, and forays into territory a lot of people think about and have beliefs about but don't formally examine. When Wessely did his work on CFS, Shellshock and gulf war syndrome I can see how it would have been extremely popular in medicine. The only problem, of course, is that the evidence for all those theories is extremely low quality.

 

You can see the certainly see parallels with shell-shock. I would have to dig out the 1922 report again, but as I recall it the conclusion was that those affected should be kept in their regiment and dealt with by the MO. On no account should they be sent to the Field Hospital. If they did make it to the Field Hospital they should not be sent back to Base. If they made it to Base they should be kept in theatre and not returned to the UK.

 

The most interesting parallel with shellshock is that it was considered psychological for years but with today's technology we know that bombardment causes microtears in the brain. The US army is developing helmets that are protective while during the first world war the men had bits of shaped metal.

 

Yes, but the problem with shell shock was that there were people said to be displaying the symptoms who had never been in action. Some had never left the base in the UK. The difficulty seemed to be an inability to discriminate between cases.

 

With a pandemic raging at the same time, one known to cause significant chronic illness.

Medicine really struggles at dealing with multiple possible causes, everything has to be oversimplified down to one primary thing. Extremely foolish, I don't understand how this became standard practice, it sure works at simplifying things but at the cost of, you know, being accurate.

 

Possibly, the ones who stayed in Britain would still have trained with live ammunition.

Now I think about it, why would soldiers who stayed in the UK be suffering psychologically anyway?

For every psychological theory I can think of a physical explanation and for every physical illness I can think of a psychological theory for why they got ill just then. It is a good game to play

What is lacking is any evidence. We would not be in the position we are with ME or Longcovid if psychological theories needed firm evidence and were held to the same standards as physical explanations. Why it is acceptable for psychology to be the default position unless there is overwhelming physical evidence against it is beyond me. If anything it should be the other way round.

 

You don't think the prospect of being sent as a replacement to a battalion that had just suffered 75% casualties could have a psychological effect?

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1404811753591017483

 

moved posts
article here-
"Why is Britain now the capital of long Covid?" - Google Docs

#MEAction Network on Twitter: "Please DON'T share the link to the Sunday Times article as it will only promote the spread of reckless disinformation, and profit bad actors. Here's a link to the article, although you may not want to bother reading such nonsense. https://t.co/5CgyFa7G57" / Twitter

This part made me laugh.

page 4
"Devine thinks that the root of the UK’s long Covid abundance is in the fierce debate over myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which has left a deep imprint in the British medical and patient community. “The reason this is so prevalent in the UK is because of the chronic fatigue lobby,” he says. “They have shaped the discourse on long Covid. You guys are the origin.” "

 

That would be typical psychological thinking. An experience is horrible so that causes psychological problems, but then other people haven't experienced it and they have similar symptoms. Yes but that is because they are worried they will share the experience.

Having covid doesn't cause longcovid, it is worrying about covid that is the problem.

Everything is proof of their theories! If I hadn't had ME I could have built a career on that sort of thinking too. I'm good at it

We could sell an app.

 

But I thought the discoursers on LongCovid had deliberately avoided any mention of ME/CFS?
Seems your damn ed if you do and damned if you don't.

 

First it was the lesbian wellness collective that invented long covid. Then the chronic fatigue lobby caused an epidemic of this made-up condition called long covid. Soon the researchers, no doubt bullied into submission by militant activists, will begin to validate the false illness beliefs of the patients.

But a lone psychiatrist is determined to save the patients from themselves.

 

It seems very helpful of Devine to so depart from the McMaster script as to bring up the "mass hysteria" line. They are usually so much more nuanced.

“This is in a way a kind of mass hysteria: the more attention you give a syndrome like this, the stronger it becomes.”

It seems a long time since we had such clarity of expression. He could soon be writing editorials for the BMJ.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/1/5687/1.1.full.pdf

There might be a new audience unfamiliar with these things.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1405073929656545283

 

A bit silly perhaps but I'm going to quote myself for emphasis and again point out that if there was indeed any truth to their point of more long-covid because of advocates warnings then they would by that same reasoning be guilty of causing hysteria among people leading to greater mental health issues due all the press on lock down being bad for MH.

Although I have doubts that JD speaks for the BPS POV more generally. This could be an own goal perhaps.

 

Woah there, Sancho, bringing common sense to an emotional tilting at windmills. You see, they can talk about mass hysteria all they want and it won't cause it. Because, uh, reasons. Yes, that's right, reasons. It's eminence, just works like that, because they're basically wizards, or something like that.

 

That there is one of Wessely's tactics, saying it's not malingering (leaving himself enough rope to save himself later) but generally giving the reader the impression that it is malingering (or hysteria).