My mom is limited by a disability but still shows up in all ways that matter-Washington Post article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/05/08/what-i-learned-watching-my-mom-parent-with-disability/

Brittany Collins, author

The mom has ME.

May be paywalled.

 

Good article. The website offers the option of limited access for free.

Reading it and the way she describes how other people's ignorance and judgement of her Mom's illness made life much harder than it needed to be, it struck me that,

on the one hand society seems to view the disabled increasingly harshly and there is always the suspicion of exaggeration or malingering,

while on the other, people are encouraged to view themselves as increasingly mentally fragile. It seems at every turn they are told that normal emotional and psychological reactions to life events are evidence of mental ill health.

That's quite a disconnect.

 

what a lovely lovely article

yes.

Edited to remove sentence that could be viewed as possible 'conspiracy theory' - too ill to discuss/defend it

 

Just started the article but dammit the link they used is to the Mayo clinic, who are absolutely awful over this.

Article is otherwise good, though lean on details, but this is a huge missed opportunity.

(Incognito/private mode bypasses the paywall but don't do that it would be bad I'm only saying this so you avoid doing something naughty)

 

https://www.brittanyrcollins.com/

Can contact her through here

 

and the second link goes to merckmanuals aka msdmanuals (although not to the CFS page).
see
https://www.s4me.info/threads/msd-manual-us-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-updated-apr-2020.14921/

 

I wrote her, but hadn't seen the links to Mayo and Merck Manual. What to link to instead?

 

Although not perfect, the CDC guide is at least passable.

Otherwise maybe a link that was passing around from something like NIH rare diseases or something like that? It was alright.

There are better resources but they aren't as authoritative. It's a serious problem that we still have to work with literal disinformation from authoritative sources, some of it literally delusional. But, you know, chicken, egg, eggless chicken, chickenless egg.

 

Will send her these and ask her to use one/more next time, or this time, if she can get it corrected. Thank you, @Trish.

 

Brittany Collins wrote back and said (among other nice things):

"I so appreciate your attention to the sources included in the piece, and the time you took to seek out these other, very valuable resources. Though it's quite challenging to get editorial boards to alter a piece once published, I will absolutely keep these links on file for future articles, as it's critically important to me to provide the most relevant and representative research."