High Perceived Stress and Low Self-Efficacy are Associated with Functional Somatic Disorders: The DanFunD Study, 2023, Fink et al

Objective: Several psychological factors have been proposed to be associated with functional somatic disorders (FSD) including functional somatic syndromes, such as irritable bowel, chronic widespread pain, and chronic fatigue. However, large randomly selected population-based studies of this association are sparse. This study aimed to investigate the association between FSD and perceived stress and self-efficacy, respectively, and to investigate if FSD differed from severe physical diseases on these aspects.
Methods: This cross-sectional study included a random sample of the adult Danish population (n = 9656). FSD were established using self-reported questionnaires and diagnostic interviews. Perceived stress was measured with Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale and self-efficacy with the General Self-Efficacy Scale. Data were analysed with generalized linear models and linear regression models.
Results: FSD were associated with higher perceived stress and lower self-efficacy, especially for the multi-organ and the general symptoms/fatigue FSD types and for chronic fatigue. However, controlling for the personality trait neuroticism altered the associations with self-efficacy so it became insignificant. The analysis did not support an important interaction between perceived stress and self-efficacy on the likelihood of having FSD. Individuals with FSD presented levels of perceived stress that were not equal, ie higher, to those in individuals with severe physical diseases.
Conclusion: FSD were positively associated with perceived stress and negatively associated with self-efficacy. Our study may point to stress being part of the symptomatology of FSD. This underlines the severity of having FSD and stresses the relevance of the resilience theory in the understanding of the condition.

https://www.dovepress.com/high-perc...th-functi-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-CLEP

 

IN layman's terms then: they just think everything is harder than it actually is (princess syndrome) because they don't 'manage themselves well'.

This is what I mean by 'selling bigotry' and pretending it is mental health help rather than attack. If only those disabled people just tried harder and is really the summary of this one above 'having a chip on their shoulder that they think they have it harder than anyone else' [PS we didn't look into any disability or calibrate against it, because well we don't believe in that, so don't want to acknowledge it, because we are just weird and bigoted and deluded so blind ourselves to it and 'wahey reality has changed']

Great attitude. Have they done the research on people without any of these with blinding (so they don't know and can't pick out those they don't like)? I'm sure everyone would be queuing up to have some dodgy methods where they can't win meaning whatever answers they put down, and whatever the reality, they end up with that nonsense accusation.

This is just people inappropriately using tools that should be calibrated and used responsibly as weapons to back up deluded presumptions they would like to 'prove' (but don't even do that just make it so dense noone realises they don't prove them) in a manifesto. When is psychology going to begin calling out these individuals. More disabled = life is harder (objectively) and you aren't 'as good as you used to be' (objectively and relative to your own pre-illness level). Selling inversion and blaming people is harming mental and physical health. That's what the subject is supposed to point out - to stop their area from causing harm 'in the name of'.

They then try and claim neuroticism is the mediator, yet quite simply when having a questionnaire thrown at you asking whether you are any good or find life hard then they are only 'picking up' confidence ie measuring 'how cocky are you' vs 'how good do you think you are'. It doesn't make the people who are cocky any better at something or any less unwell - and it certainly doesn't prove that the disability is caused by either neuroticism nor 'resilience'

These things are not 'research' or 'experiments' anymore but manifestos using fake 'designs' in order to slot in 'ergos' as pretend one-liners to confuse those who can't be arsed to pick through what they write and realise it is tying itself in knots psuedophil trying to sell poor thinking that doesn't hang together when you get to the bottom of it (ie delusion), but would like any excuse to believe they can tell disabled people to just 'think better'. And that is important for the author and their health that such things are picked up on: you realise you didn't actually test anything you think you did? and that none of this means what you think is correct?

It's like a pop-psych book that claims some lofty idea about how people can make themselves a top golfer by saying mantras simply because they ask questionnaires that showed people who were more cocky thought they were better at golf (giving higher self-assessments) than those who were less cocky (who gave more objecive self-assessments).

ANd they at least weren't being misled into thinking they were filling out something that would capture their physical disability when it was just a 'perception' claim inferring it wasn't going to be calibrated vs the factual, objective disability. Who would ever imagine when signing up that a method would be that bad, so yes it did need to be on the ethics statement.

 

It's truly absurd that this is cutting edge medicine at a time when we are on the way to build AI, fusion energy and have built incredible tools like the LHC and James Webb telescope. And this really is cutting edge medicine, it's no longer fringe stuff, it's as mainstream as it gets. In real life, it's placed on equal footing to actual science when a patient consults with a physician. The pseudoscience can even overrule the science.

There is simply no validation to any of this. They use circular questionnaires that ask about symptoms and attribute them to some magical psychological process, then have 3 physicians tip the scales where needed. 3 physicians who are supposed to have interviewed over 2K people. Not even credible.

Absolutely no validation to any of this and their entire definition of conversion disorder is stress, which they "validate" by asking questions about disability and symptoms. Was there any expectation they wouldn't find "stress" when it is literally the basis of the construct? None whatsoever. This was as rigged as PACE.

Then they ask disabled people about limitations to their abilities, with some really weird questions in the mix. You read this stuff and it's exactly the same as rich dudes whining about how poor people have refrigerators and smart phones and that means they're not really poor. It's just pure bigotry.

And then of course they use self-reports, while their entire basis for everything they do is that our self-reports are invalid and they can't test for any of this because it's all fake. You couldn't even satirize this if you tried, it's like a modern medical version of Reefer madness, total fabrication and distortion of reality.

The way things are going, we may see something close to biological immortality, at the very least from disease, while the dark corners of medicine are still going on with this circular nonsense. It's like a futuristic city with flying cars next to a shanty town, somehow all under the same budget and managed by the same people. Literally one foot in the future, and the other firmly in the atavistic past.

 

I love how the title is high “perceived” stress. They won’t even concede that the stress is warranted in their own fantasy. It’s saying that these people (patients) don’t really entertain stressful existences, they just whine about ordinary life events.

 

"Catastrophizers"

 

"stop whining or crying at me calling you names or shouting at you - it's not that bad" type person from my reading, and yes I've met a number of people like that. You should see them when they get a sniff of fair and should have been expected criticism, or more accurately being held accountable to their output or realistic consequences of it (aka perceived criticism).

 

I wonder what these authors think of patients who are stressed for some "acceptable" reason e.g. the death of a loved one, patient's house burns down and they lose everything, severe accident of some kind, loss of a job with the prospect of losing a home and/or hunger to come, being a soldier who has been severely injured during a war,...?

Who decides when stress is justified? Does it matter? Because even if the stress is considered to be justified the patient would still be offered the same treatment.

 

Unrelated but your use of the word central lit up in my brain that it's been quite a while since we've heard about central sensitization.

Because for all the junk about chronic illness being fashionable labels, like everything coming out of psychosomatic ideology: it's clearly projection. The entire field is built on fads and fashionable labels. They come and go, with slight tweaks here and there simply because they can.

MARKETING. It's all just bad marketing, but happening in a complete state of monopoly so it's just basically crude propaganda when there's just no competition and outcomes can be manufactured entirely.