Patients’ experiences of living with Long Covid and their beliefs about the role of psychology in their condition 2025 Petker and Ogden

It's time that the tables were turned and that someone did an equivalent project interviewing BPS proponents about their understanding of the baselessness of their position and the damage they're inflicting people.

Not kidding. This should genuinely be a project. Wondering how we could interest researchers in getting it going. Maybe Brian Hughes? David Marks? Anybody got contacts?

 

Would the title be: The psychology of people with unevidenced BPS beliefs, their lack of methodological rigor and their inability to see basic logical inconsistencies and the psychological phenomena that underlies these? Or where you thinking of something more specific?

 

Doesn't have to be the main proponents. I think any practitioner using these approaches would be appropriate interview subjects.

 

It could be, 'Biopsychosocial practitioners' beliefs about the evidence base for and possible harms of their therapies for ME/CFS'.

 

If they're trying to imply poor mental health predisposes people to long Covid then I think that's nonsense. Did it ever occur to them that biological factors caused poor mental health in the first place?

 

Very cringe and inept. A popular approach in the ideology is clinical education, where they teach us their stuff and then assess our understanding of what they told us. And without a doubt, they themselves fail at the same thing. We tell them why, and since they don't actually listen, their understanding comes out comically wrong. They always have to bring things upside down to fit their undying beliefs that they are right, and therefore we are wrong.

Also some very basic details wrong, as pointed out by many, that is just inexcusable. There is actually a public record of what happened with NICE, it's not excusable to have made such 'mistakes', it must have been deliberate. Even the details about pacing being criticized is unbelievable coming from so-called academics. It's true that there is widespread criticism about the only useful thing being pacing. Because it's not good enough. But it is absolutely better than the alternative pseudoscience they push instead. So they actually turned criticism of them into the opposite. All on purpose, this can't be put down to an honest mistake, it has to be deliberate.

 

I would say that this turd of a study did just that, and proved again that they fail at it. It's not the first. Every time some psychobehaviorists do some 'listening' study they always show how they don't listen to a damn thing, and that their work is mainly propaganda. They were told plainly about those things, and actually worked to twist them around to how they want reality to be. As always happens with biased ideologues.

I post it every now and then because it's so relevant, but this is essentially how it plays out: we explain it to them, they simply dismiss it. "Well it would be terrible if it were true. But it is not." This paper is basically the same thing. They straight up don't listen. They're in the business of imposing their will.

 

This is a misrepresentation. Kingstone et al. report that participants found NHS guidance advocating graded exercise to be unhelpful and even detrimental, leading to increased symptoms:

By contrast, Kingstone et al actually reports that patients independently adopted pacing as their own strategy and found it helpful:

Coyne also wrote about Ogden's role in the J Health Psychol / PACE special issue debacle in a Substack post, although Marks disputed his characterisations rather strongly.

 

There is the issue in calling themselves experts: ‘helping the patients feel listened to’ is what they think is the solution to sensible people knowing the problem is a group of people who have blocked themselves off from being able to learn a thing by choosing not to actually hear.

it is like confessing they are people who pretended to learn when they were blagging their qualifications. No intentions to pick up what science is or how to do it just tick boxes to carry on doing what they did before - saying what they think without questioning whether it is valid or logical.

you don’t and shouldn’t get the self-title for ‘time served spouting nonsense that doesn’t add up to observation by others’ and no reframing and persuasion to try and make others so emperors new clothes in human beings that isn’t there in order to fit what you fancy doing isn’t ‘help’ or indeed science. It is beyond harmful and if these people do have any psychology ability they’d understand that and why.

imagine if they took their car into a garage and the mechanic told them on the phone ‘it’ll be x’ but then they refused to look at the actual car , didn’t want to hear about the symptoms of when the issue happened and after being told the problem and sent home it actually got worse instead of better.

you’d think whatever ‘x’ is that the person thinks they are an expert in then it isn’t the same thing that my car has. And someone playing the game by passive aggressively faking ‘having listened’ is like when they’ve had a bad call centre person pantomiming to their supervisor whilst winding you up. Or trying to. Ie it shows no more expertise in the actual problem just in trying to get away with their behaviour and choosing not to change.


I come at this from a perspective of someone with a background in psychology so trying to play the game of ‘funny how all these people just were never going to like us for no reason’ victim nonsense and ‘BS expectations they don’t like psychology’ is true in this case only because it’s this problem attitude that really risks being able to call it a profession or science

 

I think there is enough ‘research’ plus interviews and articles out there to analyse them anyway.

Who is it that they general target? I think the most vulnerable when you look at the conditions chosen.

what weapons are being used: sophism, insinuation and weaponising of powers only supposed to be given in the name of mental health but stolen by said sophism and slander.

it should be quite simple to compare papers that are standard fare for diseases that are more protected vs vulnerable in what the focus is and where unevidenced insinuations are made with not a lot of analysing needed to work out why - one lot are standard scientific papers, the other is propaganda manifestos for disability bigotry charading in academic literature by often at best a nonsense Trojan horse 100,000th iteration of the exact same took 3hrs to do biased cruddy survey of cherry-picked retrospective that used coercion on the few who hadn’t dropped out due to the treatment harming (so only those without the illness remain)

it surely wouldn’t take someone who is an expert in the format and hallmarks of the two types of these to draw up a framework with tickboxes for identifying which is which and allowing them to marked the whole way through.

if they want psychology as a whole to be any part of anything people like this need to be stopped from trying to cheat their way into the game that others on the doing end are then stuck trying to make their patients fit or blaming them in order to further their political x dreams.

the issue isn’t just their topic choice it’s just what they do is cheap in every sense other than the money they intend to make off the back of it.

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1078304

News Release 27-Mar-2025
Study finds long Covid patients feel pressure to prove their illness is real
Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Surrey

image:

Professor Jane Ogden

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Credit: University of Surrey

People living with Long Covid often feel dismissed, disbelieved and unsupported by their healthcare providers, according to a new study from the University of Surrey.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Health Psychology, looked at how patients with Long Covid experience their illness. The study found that many patients feel they have to prove their illness is physical to be taken seriously and, as a result, often reject psychological support, fearing it implies their symptoms are "all in the mind".

Professor Jane Ogden, co-author of the study from the University of Surrey, said:

"We found that the problem isn't people with Long Covid refusing help – it's about the deep need for people to be believed. When a patient feels dismissed, offering psychological support instead of medical care can be misconstrued as insulting."

According to the Office for National Statistics, there are 1.9 million people who live with Long Covid in the UK. Long Covid symptoms include fatigue, difficulty concentrating, muscle aches and shortness of breath, which persist for many weeks, sometimes months, after the initial Covid-19 infection.

Surrey's study involved in-depth interviews with 14 people in the UK between the ages of 27 to 63 who had experienced Long Covid symptoms for more than four weeks. The group included 12 women and two men.

Saara Petker, clinical psychologist, co-author of the study and former PhD student at the University of Surrey, said:

"We found that our participants are living a life of constant uncertainty, struggling to find treatment. People told us that they didn't feel listened to, some said they'd lost trust in doctors, their social circles and even their own bodies because of the whole experience.

"Medical advice is crucial – but psychological support must be offered with care. If it’s seen as replacing medical help, it can feel dismissive."

Journal
Journal of Health Psychology

DOI
10.1177/13591053251325112

Article Title
Patients’ experiences of living with Long Covid and their beliefs about the role of psychology in their condition

Article Publication Date
17-Mar-2025

Disclaimer: AAAS and

 

Cant we just do a literature review, but one which w cherry pick and doesn’t even back up our assertion about the BPS deep need to be correct in the face of evidence that they’re not? Or shall we just view it through the lens of DARVO and abuse and coercion?

 

I missed this originally.

What it must be like to find out that you are completely misinformed about almost everything you are supposed to be a professor of? Maybe a strong incentive not to find out.

It might seem as if the article was written by an AI that had no access to what being human is actually about. But it presumably reflects the fact that AI machines are now very good at simulating the most of advanced of human activities:

Self-deceit.

 

Well, that's the entire premise of the biopsychosocial/psychobehavioral paradigm: where medical advice is lacking, it must be psychological. So they offer psychological support that is useless to the vast majority, which they should refuse. Where medical advice is lacking, solutions need to be developed. I see no coherent process doing that, and health care systems are obviously content with systemic failure. Which is baffling.

It's the lack of a plan B. There has to be a plan B. Instead we have a plan F, where failure gets institutionalized to the point where it becomes beyond challenge, where the failure itself becomes the reason for why the failure is natural, and any attempt to fix this problem is framed as misguided. A system where Truthiness reigns where egos get in the way of the actual truth.

Basically, they refuse to work on the problem, and as a result have no solutions. But since pretending, lying, about having solved this is a long-standing tradition, the traditional failure holds firm.

Most of us have no need for psychological support. It's as useless to me as a free lifetime membership to Blockbuster video. Which was always free anyway. That's how useless it is. As long as the industry remains obsessed with fake solutions to problems they invent instead of working on the real ones, nothing's going to change. Except as we can tell the industry doesn't mind, so we're stuck in a loop where they blame us for their own failures, then get offended because they're oblivious to the fact that their solutions are fake and don't work.

Good grief, it's not supposed to be this hard working with professionals. They're not supposed to be the ones wandering around aimlessly, unable to focus on the problem. And yet here we freaking are, 150 years after this giant error has entered the race to the bottom, which the bottom has handily won.