How GET / CBT model harms. Let us count the ways...

I think children can suffer the most from assumptions that the condition is primarily psychological, especially if it is tied up in child protection approaches.

There is a danger here though in falling in with the common belief that psychological conditions are relatively silly and you just need to pull yourself together. There is no reason to believe ME is primarily psychological, and many reasons to believe that something organic lies at the root of it, but that is no excuse to pander to the shoddy way that psychological problems are regarded and treated by people in general.

 

My niece asked her mother after having seen a doctor, who told her all her symptoms are depression (she has severe ME symptoms), if she was weird and bad. I think this shows perfectly what psycho diagnoses are and what they do with people.
It is not good when children are made to feel worthless or faulty, and this cannot be tolerated.

 

On the Parents' FB pages, there are reports of being threatened by social services involvement if a parent cannot stop her teen using a phone for too long. Too long = c3-4 hrs per day total screen time.

 

Curtailing of treatment helpful for an unrelated condition if therapist insists GET and CBT will help ME. Repeated claims that all I had to do was exercise more to recover from ME, caused me to drop the therapist who was helping with an unrelated conditioin. Every time I had the effective treatment, I was bothered by this nagging to try increasing exercise as a cure.

As well, if a pwME is injured by a health care practitioner who is treating an unrelated condtion, because the pwME has been defined as delusional or a liar by the GET/CBT system, it is heavy going in this new, and separate instance. In other words, the pwME is not believed, is dismissed, and mistreated altogether.

 

Maybe someone else has mentioned this: avoidance of the health care system when experiencing other serious, or even potentially life threatening health problems, due to ptsd from past experiences with the GET/CBT system, or bystander supporters.