Important note on BPS - British Psychological Society vs 'other bps' and issue with the confusion of acronym

I don't know whether I can get the title or the section correct here but it is a point I've been wanting to bring up quite seriously for a while.

In psychology the BPS is the British Psychological Society. And it is this that provides the accreditation for UK Psychology degrees and certainly used to by this dictate a lot of the curriculum, because of how much it needed to cover regarding the breadth of material, topics, skills, science part and statistical techniques.

Why is this relevant for ME/CFS? Well, I've noticed that the 'biopsychosocial' impetus has happened alongside a deliberate push towards 'CBT courses' or people who are 'professors in CBT' or other subjects. But also that the standard use of people who are psychologists and therefore be able to do something very different in understanding whether it is situation vs something 'pathologic' in the person, and to diagnose or undo misdiagnoses has changed towards people doing sausage machine courses so if something doesn't work because eiher the diagnosis is wrong or the treatment and description of the illness never fitted the reality then noone is in a position to flag it even if they had the intelligence and knowledge to see it.

And the issue is: the acronyms are the same. The irony is that each time I write bps for biopsychosocial I'm aware that in the world of psychology degrees that acronym means the accreditors. And this is the very society that we want to stand up to the nonsense and bad non-science/pretend stuff that is anti-mental health weaponising that label by having both irgorous standards, and applying them to the research in any niche that claims to be to do with that area. ie those in psychoology science should be auditing those who are in these niches - that was the point of it being a science to make sure no niche humiliated them with snake-oil, by providing good methods to be assessing the good from bad.

SO I don't know what to do, because we need the BPS (british psych society) onboard. We also need to look at their accreditation requirements to see if it is still the same?

I'd also be intrigued by their principles in courses and what they think of the poor inference-based at best stuff of biopsychsoc?

We need them to clean up the reputation of their own subject. Because they are the ones to call out the harm it does. 'in the name of'. and that was the very point of having the scientific subject in the first place was to ensure history wasn't repeated in harm being done under the guise of 'psych can't harm' and to make it safer. Of course it can do massive harm.

But we also need an acronym that we all consistently can use for biopsychosocial.

What can we do on this forum? and does/can anyone add answers or thoughts to some of these questions?

 

The BPS accreditation document for undergraduate degrees is here: https://cms.bps.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-07/Undergraduate Accreditation Handbook 2019.pdf

and page 10-11 onwards focuses on the content part. Note that it goes onto to talk about research design and ability to design research etc.

 

How about BPsyS ?

 

I believe that for them in the end it's about money and jobs. CBT for "medically unexplained symptoms" seems like a big market and admitting that it doesn't work is too much of a loss.

It seems more realistic for psychologists to shift towards providing supportive CBT (even if that might also not do more than contact with a caring person would).

Any move away from theoretical models that claim to explain how the psyche, trauma, psychosomatic illness, MUS, or ME/CFS work seems like a good thing to me. These model seem to be created by academics that are out of touch with reality, based on low quality studies that are falsely seen as reliable.

 

Like anyone else with a UK motorbike license, I associate CBT with Compulsory Basic Training, but it’s still easy to read S4ME threads without worrying about pwME being forced to navigate traffic cones on 100cc Yamahas. The risk of confusion between biopsychosocial and the British Psychological Society doesn’t seem much higher.

But there are other reasons for not using the BPS acronym. ME is exacerbated by poverty and caring responsibilities; it is ameliorated by wealth and being cared for. A genuinely BPS view of ME would foreground these social factors, which of course the psychosomaticisers do not.

So maybe, for clarity, we need a better term for ideological commitment to psychological therapies. One that omits the social element, just as the psychologisers do.

 

I agree, the bps approach to medicine in practice is anything but wholistic, it ignores the biological, even to the extent of some asserting paying any attention to biological aspects is actively harmful psychologically, it ignores the social unless it is to assert the patient’s illness is intended to manipulate others, but also it takes a very narrow approach to the psychological.

That any condition has biological, psychological and social aspects is a truism, but often the idea is highjacked to give spurious credibility to the researcher/clinicians’ personal beliefs or prejudices be it relating to supposed psychological culpability or weaknesses of the patient, be it a blind faith in the current preferred psychotherapy or an infatuation with the mind as a magical determiner of all things biological.

So I agree that to refer to these researcher/clinicians as bps is to grant them a credibility they do not deserve.

 

But we also need an acronym that we all consistently can use for biopsychosocial.

What can we do on this forum? and does/can anyone add answers or thoughts to some of these questions?[/QUOTE]



For me the main issue is that biopsychosocial model is foisted on patients in clinical settings without our consent. But yes, we do need to differentiate 'bps' somehow from BPS. Perhaps it's just a matter of upper and lower case?

Apologies, deviating from OP: We also need to differentiate 'Pacing superscript ME' or 'ME-Pacing' from 'pacing', as this is causing ongoing chaos in the rogue clinics and those clinics that are trying to move to NICE compliance. ME-Pacing is PEM prevention and a serious safety issue. It is multi-system covering sensory input, intellectual activity, emotional energy as well as physical, and prevents multiple symptoms in PEM. It can be helped with fairly complex technology like hrv monitoring. On the other hand, 'pacing' is 'managing your physical activity to enable a better quality of life' , ie what good physios promote when someone is learning for example to live with other chronic conditions or recover from major surgery: it's 'lets not overdo it, that's enough for today, we will walk a little further next week'. Hence when howls of anguish were issuing from 'fatigue clinics' claiming they have long stopped pushing ME patients into PEM and are being falsely accused of doing GET irresponsibly, what they meant by pacing was essentially different from ME-Pacing, and everyone talking at cross-purposes. The clinics were doing 'lets not overdo it', common sense, as a general approach, while the ME patients needed this actively taught as a vital safety measure, and to include all four dimensions which means juggling four metaphorical balls at a time. Different kinds of skill and awareness are needed.

 

I don't think I've used the term BPS but I don't see it as a problem either. If people feel they're unfairly heaped in with the people doing terrible research I've got no problem with them making a stink about it.

 

But anyone who does psychology would have thought British psychological society for BPS - which isn’t an unrelated subject area given that it’s psychology that we need to starting turning on holding and calling out the psychosomatic’s methodology (as it used to).

I don’t know whether this is the case but would be curious whether some in psychology would read stuff I’d written as BpS meaning British psych sic simply because of the ‘ME people are just in denial tgat it’s about their mind/hate psych’ type rumours biopsychsoc spread.

 

Agree context usually makes it comprehensible though good scientific writing should define abbreviations within the text of the document.

IMHO

British Psychological Society = BPS, as it has status as a professional body and already has a capitalised abbreviation, therefore ...

Bio Psycho Social needs a different abbreviation perhaps just lower case bps or even bips.