Us Nordics are always in the top positions of the "Happiest people in the world" rankings. We pride ourselves for having the best social security system in the world. Some also say that it's like winning in the lottery to be born here! How is it then possible that stories like this keep getting reported constantly in the media? And why do these stories have almost no effect, or so it seems? Ignorance is bliss.
Toxic positivity comes to mind. And we’re not used to suffering. As a Norwegian, very few of my friends or family can handle talking about the reality of my current life. Some even instruct me to not talk about permanent disability, as if that is something unreasonable to think about when I’m 99 % bedbound. I have to talk about when I get better, not if I get better.
It’s similar in Swiss culture… Always “Do you feel any better”. People don’t have a cultural conception of permanent illness. Illness has to be something that gets better with time. And Switzerland has the same “happiest country in the world” label often slapped on it. In reality it’s a trope. Come here and the average person is semi-misreable. We’re mistaking “richest country” for “happiest country” in how we measure these “happiness” indexes.
To me what is surprising is not necessarily the fact that Nordic countries score high in the various "happiness" etc indexes but that they tend to be quite progressive and modern and forward-thinking. I find it really hard to understand how a country like Norway can be one of the worst offenders of BPS ideology, as I expected badly-treated, marginalized groups like pwME to be treated with a lot more understanding and constructive, solution-oriented attitude there, and not like "hysterical women in the 19th century", to be blunt. I think I mentioned the situation in Norway once in my group and some people were really shocked as they expected the situation to be a lot rosier there for pwME, simply based on the fact that it is just so not known for being a country with widespread backwards thinking on such social matters. Quite the opposite. I always find this so surprising myself too, it seems to be such a contradiction.
On this thread, we kind of touched on the large intersection between the “social democrat” center left ideologies and BPS views. https://www.s4me.info/threads/mind-and-body-in-the-guardian-again.42348/
My experience is that a lot of health care workers also believe the hype of how progressive we are, so they refuse to believe we can be treated badly without there being good cause (ie. it's needed "tough love" we are treated with).
IMO, one issue is the high levels of trust in our society, especially towards public institutions. When you couple that with conflict avoidance, the incompetent people are able to rise to power in the very large (30+ % of the workforce) public sector without being challenged. If I try to tell someone that the public health agencies completely dropped the ball on the ongoing Covid pandemic, most people are not able to imagine or accept that the experts can be so wrong. There are also many issues with regards to «incapacity» in the public sector.
Stuff like this always has terms and conditions: only for working people, or people who can grow up to be working people, or people who worked most of their lives. That's why the primary goal of health care before retirement age is to get people back to work, regardless of capacity. The public lie is to pretend like this extends to those who deserve support, but that's a lottery system based on arbitrary factors, most of which have little to do with those unfortunate to need help from society. So it's true for those with good enough health, highest standards of living. It's just that the same general formula applies for those who are unlucky as in any other society: screw you, you're useless. Fundamentally everyone has thresholds to write people off. Few people would object to mass murderers being beat up to death by a mob. From there it's a bunch of filters that divide people between people and not-people, haves and have-nots. And all societies write off sick people as not-people, closer to where pets are. And even then, oftentimes below. This will continue as long as medicine remains so primitive we can barely handle more than a fraction of the needs out there.
Human nature doesn't change. Context can change how it's expressed, but human nature is the same everywhere, and we are the exact same nature as the very first humans.
21-åriga Victorias kamp mot postcovid – fem år efter första svenska coronafallet https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/v...ovid-fem-ar-efter-forsta-svenska-coronafallet
Opinion piece: ”Sverige är inte redo för nästa viruspandemi” https://www.dn.se/debatt/sverige-ar-inte-redo-for-nasta-viruspandemi/
Marie, 49, blev sjuk i covid 2021 – är inte frisk än https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/VzXbbp/marie-ewerz-blev-sjuk-i-covid-2021-ar-inte-frisk-an
This conference looks good except for P*trino. Is anyone here going to this? It looks like the 2nd day will be posted later to youtube, but not the first day? No livestream, correct? Thanks.
The search function is your friend. ETA there has already been a lot of discussion of this individual.
Very much on the “BioBS” side of things. Ie. claiming a lot of unproven things and recommending unproven treatments.
Thanks! He’s a bit of a saint in some patient communities, but I guess that’s because he’s very outspoken against GET/CBT and he says that he has fixes for some LC. There’s a lot to unlearn when you’re new to this forum, so I appreciate the explanation!
No worries. I’m still unlearning some thing I thought were fact but don’t really have evidence behind them. The online ME spaces are ripe with disinfo — I’m glad this forum exists — it would be very isolating as a scientifically minded person otherwise.
