Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: a cognitive approach. Surawy et al. 1995.

This is an old paper, but of more than historical interest. I came upon it s significance by chance. Others might have, like me, seen no pressing need to explore the views of someone of whom they had never heard on the subject of CFS. They would have shared my error. Surawy appears to be a psychologist with a current interest in mindfulness. Hackman was a psychologist with an interest in anxiety disorders. The other two authors are Oxford's finest. Hawton and Sharpe, for it is they, need no introduction. The paper, although published in 1995, was dated 1993, and sets out in detail the basic Oxford model.

There is little that we do not know from other papers. It is however useful to see the full horror show set out in such detail, and there are other points of interest.

It seeks to distinguish between the Wesselyan model and the Oxford model on the basis that SW only sought to explain perpetuation of symptoms whereas their model was aetiological. It may be a distinction without a difference, merely dependent upon the point at which one considers CFS to commence.

Ithought it interesting to see the collaborators or those being associated with the paper.

Acknowledgements--The model of CFS described in this paper has been elaborated as a result of experience gained during a trial of psychological treatment for patients with CFS which was funded by the Wellcome Trust. We wish to thank Dr T. E. A. Peto and Professor D. Warrell for referring patients to our study. We are also grateful to Dr D. Clark, Ms Alison Clements and Professor A. T. Beck for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Clark would seem to be the man who along with Layard devised IAPT. I had not appreciated the degree of collaboration with Beck, although his papers on depression are frequently cited.

The caveats surrounding the conclusions are interesting. They seem to have been overlooked at some later point.

We acknowledge that CFS is unlikely to be a homogenous condition, and that the observations we have described may not be relevant in all cases. Furthermore our proposed perspective does not exclude a specific physiological substrate or substrates for the illness, but rather seeks to emphasize the role of cognitions and behaviour in both predisposing to and perpetuating the condition. Although further research is clearly needed to determine its validity, the cognitive perspective points to specific treatment interventions for this distressing and disabling illness.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(94)00077-W

Behaviour Research and Therapy
Volume 33, Issue 5, June 1995, Pages 535-544

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A cognitive approach
Author links open overlay panelChristinaSurawyAnnHackmannKeithHawtonMichaelSharpe

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0005-7967(94)00077-W

 

I had the misfortune of being diagnosed by Tim Peto in 2018, who was then (and still may be) seeing ME/CFS patients in Oxford. I left with a recommendation to "do fun and frivolous things" and "do things badly on purpose", together with a sheet of paper with "Lightning Process", "Trudie Chalder" and "Mike Sharpe" written on it. There was also a diagram linking symptoms to patterns of behaviour that looks similar to some of the diagrams in this paper.

 

One might have hoped that they were not so stupid as to have learned nothing in thirty years. Apparently they are.

 

If you still had that, you could anonymise it and put it online? Always interesting to have examples of these things.

 

Oh yes, I've kept it, and have had the idea to do a blog post on it sometime. Just need to get round to doing it.

 

eta:
alternative link
https://www.sci-hub.ee/10.1016/0005-7967(94)00077-w