Sly Saint
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Long piece in SLATE by Grace Huckins
Long COVID and Mental Illness: How the brain can affect the body (slate.com)
Andrea Roberts was getting ready to submit a study for publication, and she was worried. A senior research scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, she had just written a paper suggesting that people with high stress levels were more likely to develop long COVID after an acute infection.
Roberts has spent the past decade studying the link between physical health and mental health. She knows that psychology can play a role in almost any illness; a few years ago, she discovered a link between PTSD and ovarian cancer. On paper, the new finding was no different from those in her previous studies, but this time she added a disclaimer to her article. “Our results should not be misinterpreted as supporting a hypothesis that post–COVID-19 conditions are psychosomatic,” she wrote.
...Her worries were not unfounded. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Psychiatry on Sep. 7 of last year. A few days later, Jeremy Redfern, a member of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, tweeted out the article and put “long COVID” in scare quotes. In the replies, people referred to long COVID as a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and “symptom of liberalism.”
Roberts had meant to convey with the disclaimer that long COVID is not a fake condition, and that patients experiencing it are not duping doctors or themselves (as Redfern implied they were). In doing so, however, she used the word “psychosomatic” to mean “fake.” But that’s not how “psychosomatic” is used in medicine, and she now has mixed feelings about the disclaimer. “The actual definition of psychosomatic is a connection between your psyche and your soma,” Roberts says—that is, your mind and your body. That connection can look like so-called “hysterical” blindness, where a traumatic experience causes someone to lose their sight without any apparent damage to their visual system, or like the well-known (and uncontroversial) relationship between stress and heart disease. Based on that technical definition, Roberts says what she’s showing in the long COVID study “is actually psychosomatic.”
Long-haulers are not the first patients to feel gaslit and ignored. For a long time, ME/CFS—which is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome and bears a strong resemblance to some cases of long COVID—was popularly referred to as “yuppie flu.” Some in the medical world also thought that the illness could have a social element: In 1970, two doctors published a paper in the British Medical Journal arguing that the condition, then referred to as “benign myalgic encephalomyelitis,” was really mass hysteria.
In deploying the term “mass hysteria,” the British doctors didn’t mean to suggest that the patients were consciously faking their illness, but rather that their symptoms were purely psychological. But to many readers, the paper nevertheless seemed pejorative, and several clinicians and patients sent letters to the British Medical Journal expressing their indignation. “It is essential to treat this disease seriously,” wrote Betty Scott, a doctor who had worked with myalgic encephalomyelitis patients. “If a diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ is even hinted, the patient experiences a profound loss of confidence in his medical advisers.”
Today, many ME/CFS patients feel similarly about the idea that psychological factors may play a major role in their condition, and scientists have discovered a variety of biological changes in patients. That doesn’t suggest that psychology is irrelevant, however. Patients are the experts on their own symptoms—but without medical examination, it can be impossible for them to tell whether those symptoms are rooted in biology, psychology, or both.
Long COVID and Mental Illness: How the brain can affect the body (slate.com)