Oh, wow. OK. This is just a perfectly distilled ultra-concentrated example of everything wrong with BPS. It's like
a man eating his own head, now I
have seen everything.
First off it's a basic requirement for diagnosing ME, even CFS, to differentiate depression. It's a widely diagnosed condition, one often presented as an alternative to ME/CFS, meaning it should actually be more identifiable. Which it isn't, because even "experts" cannot tell the difference. Tens of millions are diagnosed with depression, with massive consequences, despite the diagnosis being unreliable.
So then you have this:
Comorbid depression is common in adolescents with chronic illness. We aimed to design and test a linguistic coding scheme for identifying depression in adolescents
stating that it is common and yet still has to be identified using a bizarre linguistic proxy. Or do you struggle to differentiate it and have to resort to weird schemes? So how can it be said to be common if it still needs to be identified? Those things are in direct opposition to one another.
Especially as one of the most common beliefs I have seen among physicians is that CFS is the physical symptoms of depression, whatever that means. This is largely inspired by work from Crawley and her likeminded BPS colleagues, because they always present anxiety and depression, both hard to diagnose because there are no reliable tests, as being common, if not universal in CFS.
But of course diagnoses of anxiety or depression are no more reliable than CFS with x months of "fatigue", whatever that means. But they are presented as more applicable diagnoses because... they are seen as more easily identifiable? Which is clearly not the case when you have studies like this that make it clear that the people who insist CFS is the thing they insist it is cannot tell the difference and still need to try and devise Rube Goldberg methods to tell it apart, because they can't, even though their model depends on it.
A good point is that this is not a questionnaire. Questionnaire are not reliable and should never, ever, be the only tool, especially used only on small samples in cherry-picked circumstances, used to decide on abandoning millions of people to suffering and premature death. A bad point is that this linguistic analysis is even less reliable, literally tells nothing and would never tell apart someone with CFS, ME, the flu, MS or just generally being misanthrope or whatever other things go into that spurious linguistic analysis.
Notable that this could have been done 30 years ago, as is, regardless of anything that has happened since the point at which people like Crawley and other BPS ideologues hijacked ME and actually regressed it. No new technology or scientific knowledge in the last 30 years are of any relevance other than computer technology making linguistic analysis faster, without actually making it any more relevant in the identification of depressive thoughts, nevermind that depressed thoughts are the most natural response to an impossibly desperate situation, a reality caused in large part because of the BPS stranglehold so this is basically reality folding on itself here.
It's not exactly surprising but still shocking to witness this much incompetence running in circles for so long by now the bodies they leave in their wake add up to a sizable structure under their feet. And no doubt the most common reaction to this study will be contentment at the fact that it incorporates a psychosocial perspective, as if this was a desirable goal rather than a process.
At this point most of my anger is directed to people who give this garbage legitimacy. It's not even close to be credible and yet it effectively acts as judge, jury and executioner to millions of lives further broken by levels of incompetence that seem to persist only because no one actually believes anyone working in medicine could be this bad. And yet it appears to be common and it doesn't take a linguistic analysis to find that out.