Cortisol levels in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and atypical depression measured using hair and saliva specimens, 2020, Cleare/Chalder/others

I think lots of things might mask the onset of ME. My own clinical picture was confused by hypothyroidism and borderline a anaemia. My hypothyroidism wasn't well managed as the GP at the time felt TSH and T4 levels in "normal" range should relieve all symptoms.

Then we have the effect where early signs of other conditions are misdiagnosed as ME. I've met a couple of MS patients who lived with an ME diagnosis for years when they had MS.

 

I was curious about what is atypical depression and it's frankly a mishmash of non-specific things that likely include quite many mild CFS patients but also a very random assortment of unrelated things:

Honestly really looks like about 90% of mental health research is a bunch of pseudo-random guesses and attempts to fit various things in boxes for the purpose of having boxes filled with stuff. No one understands anything about this stuff, the field is about at the stage cosmology was in the middle ages, mostly guesses, mostly wrong and not useful for much but damn are those celestial sphere pretty and awe-inspiring.

 

A bit like astrology really - make enough sufficiently vague statements applicable to much of the population, and people end up thinking it's science!

 

Now published. Paywall, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032719314466
Sci hub, https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.jad.2020.01.146

 

The paper writes:

Weird how they got this all wrong. The whole point of the SSD construct was to stop the association between somatisation and medically unexplained symptoms. So SSD can be diagnosed as a comorbidity in patients with cancer, heart disease or CFS - it doesn't matter if symptoms are explained or not. Dimsdale et al. who presented the new SSD construct wrote that "It deemphasizes the centrality of medically unexplained symptoms and defines the disorder on the basis of persistent somatic symptoms associated with disproportionate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to these symptoms."

The authors of this seemed to have really misinterpreted SSD, unless they actually wanted to make the suggestion that CFS is a psychiatric disorder characterized not by symptoms but by disproportionate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

 

I was looking for the definition of a-typical depression, but there it is. So, it’s pretty much nothing specific? Random symptoms?

 

now published in
Journal of Affective Disorders
Volume 267, 15 April 2020, Pages 307-314

eta:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032719314466?via=ihub