ME/CFS SKeptic: A new blog series on the dark history of psychosomatic medicine

Does anyone ever ask themselves why this change happened? Film footage from the 1970s shows people are all slender. Something changed - and I am not convinced it was people. It is almost like society and people everywhere in the western world changed practically overnight. Evolution simply doesn't happen that way. So something else must have changed and people have been blamed ever since. I think the problem is that food became something that powerful people could make profits from. And once they (the people with power and money) decided that there was money to be made, anything and everything that could reduce costs and increase profits became normal.

 

Diet has changed enormously. I remember processed food increasingly appearing in the late 60s and early 70s.

Until then it was a badge of shame for mothers to feed packaged and processed food to their children. I also remember in 1970 seeing a microwave for the first time. A friend’s parents took us on a forty mile drive to have self service microwave meals at a futuristic café. It was supposed to be really exciting, though even as a 12 year old I could not understand reheating food after it had been sitting around for goodness knows how long was in any way exciting. It never occurred to me that fifty years later a lot of people would be eating only premade meals.

 

One change I think would be that store shelves started to stock foods from farther away. This might seem quite innocuous and maybe it is but it requires a different way of harvesting and transporting food while keeping it fresh.

And people local to where this food is imported from do not eat from the food destined for export.

Also, some of the far away food producers did /do not have the same levels of inadequate protections against toxic substances that exist in the wealthiest nations. This would even apply to vehicles that drive around the farm. Many still even recently use leaded petrol.

Whether this has anything to do with obesity and other health problems remains to be seen.
It is one of many, many areas of the social aspects of living where science spends all it's time looking under the lamplight fearing that looking elsewhere they may actually find their keys.

Also, after writing this post (and not posting) I came upon a news brief from a news site I was viewing so looked up the study referred to and linked below:

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/ddt-exposure-grandmothers-linked-obesity-earlier-periods-granddaughters

 

My parents, born in 1929 were thin as were most people with a certain variation for genetics. My gran was overweight but she had had 13 children.

The reasons for the difference between then and now are maybe not the obvious.

Firstly, they had much more physical lives but they also had most things within possible walking distance. A half hour walk to work is possible but my son had a 2 hour bus journey each way which left very little time for anything except eat and sleep. He also sat for eight hours working hard while they had physically demanding jobs.

Everyone smoked. They talk about second hand smoke but unless you experienced a cinema in the old days it is hard to imagine just how smoky they were.

It was cold and a lot of calories were burned to keep warm. My gran would put on the gas oven at a peep and have breakfast with her feet inside. Coal was only used at weekends.

Meal times were fixed. At five to twelve the stomachs in my class would start to rumble as bodies prepared to ingest food. I am sure that made it easier to develop satiation signals. Actually life was lived to a very regular schedule most of the time.

People did not worry about what they ate. Nowadays everyone is trying to limit food intake and we know people put on weight after they diet.

People did not have fizzy drinks but they would put loads of sugar in tea. Toddlers had tea with lots of milk and lots of sugar. My mother had a bar of chocolate every night and often had a cake instead of lunch.

I have read that they only way to make a profit from food is to get people to eat more of it which is why the portions in the US are so large. From the 70s food became very unhealthy and it horrifies me when I listen to people talk about what they eat when dieting, it is all processed.

Environmental factors could have a big impact. Lead from petrol acts on the brain, fish became feminised by waste water on and on yet it is never considered. Obviously better to blame people for being greedy than to suspect big business.

 

Currently reading about the myth of the schizophrenic mother, and thought this was an interesting read:

Mistreatment of Patients' Families by Psychiatrists
WILLIAM S. APPLETON

Abstract
Many schools of psychiatric thought implicate the patient's family in aggravating and even generating his illness. Thus psychiatrists often blame and mistreat the family, through either open hostility or vague innuendo; the family in turn becomes less willing to cooperate in the patient's treatment. As a solution, the author recommends that psychiatrists be taught to treat families with sympathy and understanding in order to win their confidence and cooperation and with respect rather than subtle contempt.

Source: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.131.6.655

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1387353946935730176

 

The fight of parents of autistic children against the myth of the refrigerator mother and psychogenic causation has quite a lot of similarities to the work ME/CFS advocates today.

An interesting read is this paper by Bernard Rimland: “Psychogenesis Versus Biogenesis: The Issues and the Evidence”
Available here: https://isom.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/JOM_1971_03_1_02_Psychogenesis_Versus_Biogenesis_The_Issues-.pdf

 

@Michiel Tack, thank you yet another interesting read. The series as a whole will be a useful resource.

 

About 1980 I became friendly with a woman whose son was severely autistic. She was quite upfront that it was her fault because she had spent 3 weeks in hospital while having her second child at what she had been told was "a crucial" point in her older son's development.

 

It is surprising the potentially lifelong damage that misinformation given to parents of a young child can have. Many years ago I was assessing the communication needs of a group of adults with physical disability, whose long established day centre was losing its funding for their places. I was having unexplained problems getting to see one of the service users at home with his family. He obviously enjoyed social interaction, but I failed to demonstrate any language understanding or any specific words in his prolific vocal output at the day centre.

The time of a case conference in the family home had been put back an hour, but I had not been told so I arrived at the house early before the family had got to their son whisked away to relatives and out of sight. It transpired the family had developed a complex communication system, which involved holding his hands and putting one hand over his mouth when you were speaking to him, then releasing him to respond, then largely ignoring the vocalisations he made, but focusing on what to the uninitiated seemed like random gesture, but was in fact a complex series of idiosyncratic signs.

For example people were identified by pointing in the direction of their homes or workplace when looking from the front of his home, so to understand you needed to imagine he was standing with his back to his own front door and then know the relative directions of some thirty or so other locations, some only differentiated by just a few degrees. A farm he often visited was indicated by gesturing going over a humped back bridge, and different farm animals indicated by accompanying very approximate animal noises with this bridge gesture.

The parents, because of things they had been told by doctors some years before in the 1950s, partly about only accepting speech but also about how they interacted with him, had managed to keep this effective communication secret to just immediate family all through his education and much of his adulthood.

In the short time I had available with him, we just worked on getting the directed turn taking in a form more usable by non family members, ie less hands on, and creating with him and his family a dictionary of signs. Just being able to let go of their embarrassment and guilt was I think a release for his parents, who overnight became the go to experts on their son’s communication.

The parents also made a video dictionary of his signing for new carers. In the time I was aware of him, supporting his transition between services, we did not get a full understanding of his underlying disabilities: how much was his physical disability, how much was a learning disability, was there any autism, had there been any previous intermittent hearing loss when younger, etc? In the short term we felt enabling the new care workers to understand his communication, was more important than any detailed assessment for possible future rehabilitation input, [leaving that up to his new service.]

I can not help but wonder how much more might he have achieved if the parents had not been left feeling they were irrelevant and potentially harmful to his development and education right from when he was very young.

[corrected some typos]

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1393551398239940611


New blog post where we explore the myth of the schizophrenogenic mother.

Today schizophrenia is regarded as a brain disease but several decades ago, psychosomatic explanations were in vogue. The psychotic delusions of the great mathematician John Nash, for example, were blamed on fetus envy.

In the first decades after the Second World War, the dominant view in American psychiatry was that parents – mothers in particular – were responsible for causing schizophrenia in their children. One paper summarized that “the schizophrenic is always one who is reared by a woman who suffers from a perversion of the maternal instinct.”

The most prominent proponent of this view was Theodore Lidz from Johns Hopkins and Yale university. He emphasized that families of patients with schizophrenia were ALWAYS disturbed: “those who disagree with the ‘always’ have not studied the patients’ families intensively”, he said.

The term ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ was coined by psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Her idea to treat schizophrenia with psychoanalysis was popularized in the novel “I never promised you a rose garden.”

The treatment, however, didn’t work. 1983 Thomas McGlashan analyzed the data from the clinic where Fromm-Reichmann worked and introduced her approach. “Frieda […] embarked on a grand experiment” he said. “The data is in. The experiment failed.”

Three factors contributed to the downfall of psychosomatic theories of schizophrenia: the discovery of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s, evidence of a large genetic contribution to the illness, and patient advocacy organizations. One advocate, a mother of a patient, famously said: “We failed to understand why parents of a child with leukemia were treated with sympathy and understanding, while parents of a child with schizophrenia were treated with scorn and condemnation.”

Full text at: https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-dark-psychosomatic-history-of-schizophrenia/

 

@Michiel Tack, thank you another excellent read.

Are you considering the possibility of publishing the whole series together in book form?

 

It's in the back of our mind but that would be a long-term project that will take a lot of effort. We are first going to proceed with posting these blog posts and then see afterward if there is enough material to start thinking about a book.

 

It would be interesting to have feedback from other patient communities. If you know anyone in other patient communities feel free to ask them their view or opinion.

We try to read up on each illness that we write about but it's soo much material that we probably cannot grasp all the complexities.

 

I've come across this thread a few months on and the links to the articles are broken.

In case anyone else is looking for them, they can all be accessed on this page:

https://mecfsskeptic.com/tag/dark-history-of-psychosomatic-medicine/

 

The above link didn't work for me until I disconnected my VPN.

 

This is really good @Michiel Tack!

Only just had a quick skim, but this is one very informative gem:

@dave30th Might it be worth an article based on Michiel's "Dark History" blogs? Could now be the right time to try opening the eyes of the wider medical community to this lunacy? Maybe with a little more dates info within the text.

 

Code:

https://twitter.com/b_m_hughes/status/1461066024510492681

 

The dark psychosomatic history of cancer part I

"Since ancient times, the onset of cancer has been linked to depression and melancholia. Hopelessness, despair, and sorrow were regularly mentioned as a trigger of cancer until modern research refuted such a connection.

In the second half of the 20th century, the idea of a cancer-prone personality became widespread in both the scientific and popular press. People who repressed their anger and emotions were said to be at higher risk of developing cancer. Behavioral therapy was proposed as a treatment and prophylaxis. Our investigation shows that some of the researchers who introduced these ideas were financially supported by the tobacco industry to turn attention away from causal links between smoking and cancer.

Another psychosomatic myth states that having a positive attitude or a “fighting spirit” leads to a better prognosis. The notion that patients could cure themselves of cancer if they had the right attitude or tried hard enough to overcome it, became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. These ideas were not supported by scientific evidence and led to stigma, guilt, and frustration.

As we will discover, the history of cancer has surprisingly many of these episodes. We will therefore divide it into three parts. Today, in part I, we look at the early history, from the ancient humors to wild psychoanalytic theories in the middle of the 20th century."

https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-dark-psychosomatic-history-of-cancer-part-i/