Long Covid Advocacy (Substack blog)

Hutan

Hutan

Moderator
Staff member
We've been seeing some really great writing coming from Long Covid Advocacy on Substack, so I thought it was worth making a thread for them.

Home here

There was that excellent letter to Miranda Hart, the response to Mendenhall's book, and the commentary on The Salt Path, among others. All readable, wry, clever, and, above all, reliably spot on in a field where it is difficult to consistently get things right.

Here's the latest - Psychologisation 101 - a excellent primer

One can say: it’s real; there are biological factors; it’s complex'; I believe the science; it’s multi-system; and still psychologise. This is usually through tinkering with mind-body theories around safety and danger.

It is crucial to realise that if you are proposing that psychological factors are influencing symptoms in the absence of robust biological evidence that the disease has resolved, you are psychologising.

If you are framing recovery or improvement of symptoms as dependent on correcting cognition, emotions or behaviour, you are psychologising.

If you are placing the burden of disease perpetuation (fully or partially) on patient psychology, of being stuck in a state of fight and flight that needs to be calmed by psychological methods rather than unresolved pathophysiology, you are psychologising.

One can believe all the physical research, and still psychologise.

One does not have to be Simon Wessely, or one of the BPS crew, to psychologise and even they deny it.
Click to expand...

It is easy to look at psychologisation and be seduced by its promise of ‘holistic’ ‘patient-centred’ care. But it does three predominant things that cause harm:

  1. It redirects research funding away from biology.
  2. It alters clinical tone from investigation to management.
  3. It subtly transfers responsibility from system failure to patient behaviour.
It is why, as a battle line, it is so important to defend and to identify when it is happening. It produces a system where patients are believed - but not fully. Where illness is acknowledged but demedicalised. It is why it is so hard to spot and so easy to deny. It looks sophisticated; it looks plausible; it looks holistic and caring, but it is not - it is violent.
Click to expand...


To Long Covid Advocacy - well done, please keep writing.
 
Looking over the list of this charity's advisors it is very clear that they do not have a clue what it is they are doing. Nicholson is heavily involved in the FND world & advisor to multiple FND charities. And they are really scraping the very bottom of the barrel with Chew-Graham, who was a co-author of the infamous "bastards" paper and was one of the principal authors of this rather dreadful document on the commissioning of "MUS" clinics (in which they included ME/CFS as an example of a "functional somatic syndrome" that should apparently fall under the rubric of "MUS" and be "treated" in their proposed psychobehavioural clinics).

PwLC are just as ill-served by the organisations claiming to represent them as we are.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom