New article in the spectator mentions ME/CFS and death threats.

Adam pwme

Adam pwme

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
"There have been medically motivated attacks in the past: psychiatrists working on chronic fatigue in the UK received death threats in 2011, and in 2022 a doctor in Tulsa was shot by a patient with back pain."

www.spectator.co.uk

Are you in #ChronicPain?

Chronic pain forums are fuelling anger and radicalisation as sufferers feel unheard by medical systems across the globe.
www.spectator.co.uk www.spectator.co.uk
 
My first thought when Luigi Mangione was said to have chronic health issues including post-Lyme was to think this might be weaponised against us.

Glad to see this hasn’t generally been the case, but sad to see this article basically equating online insults with literal shootings.
 
[Posted on behalf of @MSEsperanza]

Are you in #ChronicPain? by Sarah Fletcher, 9 Jun 2025, The Spectator

Web.archive link if you didn't want to give the article traffic:

https://web.archive.org/web/2025060...ectator.co.uk/article/are-you-in-chronicpain/

The pinned post at the top of the r/ChronicPain subreddit is ‘how to get doctors to take you seriously’. The subreddit has 131,000 subscribers, and is a tricky community for outsiders to understand. People talk in acronyms (chronic lower back pain – CLBP, myalgic encephalomyelitis – ME, acceptance and commitment therapy – ACT) and have their own vocabulary (‘spoonies’ and ‘zebras’). There are flippant memes about muscle relaxants next to horrific stories of medical negligence. People report their condition being so bad that they’ve dropped out of school or are even unable to care for their children.
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We can imagine the feelings of grief – and, of course, the sheer physical suffering – that come with chronic pain conditions. Or at least, we can try to. But anger at not being taken seriously seems to be the predominant emotion on these forums. It’s one thing to grieve for the life you thought you might live, and another to feel that people somehow see you as complicit in your own agony – whether due to compassion fatigue from friends, or dismissal by doctors. Medical institutions and quacks alike offer a carrot-on-a-stick approach to various treatments – many of them expensive – which often fail to improve quality of life. The resulting emotions are all different shades of anger: frustration, exhaustion, righteous indignation, pure outrage.
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Luigi isn’t even particularly unpopular on the internet. Lots of people (in USA I think) think what he did was inevitable, there are so many stories of people not just being denied treatment, but quite obviously being led a merry dance, terms being changed, surgeons called out from starting an op because funding is revoked, it’s a whole bonfire.

UK based chatter seems to be “well it’s bad, but you can’t just kill people you don’t like/do jobs you don’t agree with” also quite mild, considering.

I think spin can go either way, but I think in the UK (and hopefully Europe/Australia etc) people understand the difference between a medical researcher/doctor and the CEO of a Medical Insurer.
Nice try, journalist, by making “people in chronic pain” the radicalised problem. That isn’t a thing.
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
There are millions of people in chronic pain while shootings like the one by Mangione almost never happen. So I don't think there is a strong connection here.
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I don’t think there’s been any substantive research, does anyone know of any papers on Chronic Pain/Chronic Physical Diseases levels in ISIS? What about surveying Violent Offenders currently in jail, maybe they all have tendinitis or impacted wisdom teeth? Would mindfulness have prevented WWII/s
 
MrMagoo said:
I don’t think there’s been any substantive research, does anyone know of any papers on Chronic Pain/Chronic Physical Diseases levels in ISIS? What about surveying Violent Offenders currently in jail, maybe they all have tendinitis or impacted wisdom teeth? Would mindfulness have prevented WWII/s
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Keep thinking like this and we’ll have government paracetamol mandates (/s)
 
What rubbish.

Poor journalism, if that is what it is. Yes, people should be listened to but I think her article is just more scaremongering.

So now people are supposedly cocooned in online groups, (well if that is so why would we want to leave our lovely place of safety and go kill medical personnel?). From a forensic psychiatry view, there is usually a lot more going on for a person, to do such an act, than being in an online support group.

I think using the term radicalisation is sensationalism, but apparently that is what journalism seems to be for some folk who appears to be advocating for us but really are not. I have to wonder about her intent.

It is not good to threaten violence to anyone even when angry, frustrated and in pain. I think most people know this whether they have ME or chronic pain. You usually get discharged quick smart from a medical service and police informed.

People on the internet do say stupid stuff like this and often no-one knows if it is true intent, who it is (as most people post anonymously), or does that person actually have ME/chronic pain etc. I often wonder if people who say this sort of thing just get a kick out of saying extreme things and like to disrupt online groups.

People have been in pain and not listened to for ages and I doubt that will "urgently" change due to her article.
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
There are millions of people in chronic pain while shootings like the one by Mangione almost never happen. So I don't think there is a strong connection here.
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The real story here, of course, is how unbelievably restrained the victims are under some of the most dishonest and cruel, and sometimes lifelong, provocations and abuses that can be dished out by medical authorities and the broader governance system that benefits from it and protects them from real accountability and reform.

How often do you see that story in the mainstream media?

What is the appropriate response when all of the 'approved' mechanisms for change not only don't work but get ruthlessly used against us to hijack and pervert any progress and reform, and the guilty not only get protected but well rewarded for their, um, contribution to the current situation?

At what point does the hallowed fourth estate start considering and reporting on where the real problem and blame lies? Do they even begin to understand just how cruel and life-destroying this stuff is?

*crickets, again*
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
There are millions of people in chronic pain while shootings like the one by Mangione almost never happen. So I don't think there is a strong connection here.
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Not meaning to chastise anyone here, but just wanted to note that in the US, there is quite a lot of skepticism that Luigi Mangione is actually the shooter. He has not been proven guilty, and in fact there is much suspicion that a notoriously corrupt institution with a long history of framing innocent people planted evidence on him (his backpack “disappeared” for a long time after being confiscated, and only at a much later point was any weapon found in it), not to mention notable discrepancies between Luigi and the original images of the suspected shooter.

I am not sure how much discussion of the possible framing of an innocent man has reached beyond the US. Whoever the shooter was, I am sure they have their own reasons, I’d just caution against discussing Mangione as if he actually was the shooter. I agree with your general point in this post, though.
 
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