State of Mind: Is Long COVID Linked to Mental Illness?

I would be happy for a neuropsychiatrist who was interested in PHYSIOLOGY of the brain to be interested in ME.

 

I skimmed the article. If she is a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford why didn’t she interview M Monje and M James both of whom work on brain/neuro LC/MECFS issues at Stanford—In addition to the other usual suspects like R Davis, M Davis and M Snyder?

Honestly a lot of these so-called journalists get their expert sources from Twitter, which is a big red flag and a crappy journalism practice.

 

Grace Huckins on the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) site:


"I am a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford University, and I am also pursuing a minor in philosophy. I am fascinated by the ways in which science tries to understand and explain the world—and, in particular, the social implications of those processes. Currently, I am studying what happens when scientists bring together machine learning and brain scans in an attempt to uncover the biological roots of mental illness. Before coming to Stanford, I completed master's degrees in neuroscience and gender studies at Oxford, where I focused on the neuroscientific study of gender identity. In my writing, I want help marginalized groups engage with the scientific and technological endeavors that profoundly affect them but too rarely seek their input. I am absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to work at WIRED this summer and to be a part of this year's AAAS MMF cohort."

https://www.aaas.org/programs/mass-media-fellowship/grace-huckins




For goodness sake, the back-to-front-ness of Grace's claims on the AAAS site, contrasted with what she wrote in her Slate LC article, plus her dismissive attitude to the ME and LC patients who are more informed about ME and LC research than she is - it's doing my head in. The more I read her tweets on the subject of her article the more patronising she sounds. It would appear that ME and LC patients are the wrong kind of 'marginalised group', the unworthy ones - or not marginalised at all in Grace's limited and narrow view.


Slate have sidestepped all the criticisms of the article by simply tweeting it again, and again.

 

Tuesday evening 27th June

https://twitter.com/user/status/1673765635380350977




Grace on 'terrified' patients. Still patronising, still pontificating. Oblivious of the political dimensions of ME (and now LC) research, what's funded and what's not funded, who gains and who loses..



https://twitter.com/user/status/1673765666002972673




Groan - she *still* thinks she knows best - and should have the right to insert herself and her beliefs into the issue of what LC research funding should be spent on.



https://twitter.com/user/status/1673765685594558465



And has the arrogance to pronounce on what (in her fantasies) has harmed us.

 

paternalism that’s what. And she should have encountered that term as part of her gender studies unless something went very wrong with her studies so I don’t know why she is engaging in being a paternalist cliche.

 

David Tuller has tweeted about this article.

Thread

 

This is what the block button is for. It's a nice button with a very nice function. I use it often nowadays.

Edit: and this is why I block people like that

 

good thread
https://twitter.com/user/status/1673733150600470532

 

If I wrote a piece about some ethnic group, and a band of cretinous bigots were praising it, I would stop and think twice about what I’ve just contributed to. She seems to believe that anyone interpreting her work in such a fashion, hasn’t actually read it. Moreover, she thinks patients who contest this paradigm are either too emotional or ignorant to view the problem rationally.

I hope someone writes a counterpoint to this. These manifestos are exhausting, and they appear inescapable.

P.S. Gaffney isn’t an expert!!!

 

Staggering arrogance.

 

Another person with nothing new to offer inserting herself into a conversation that has been going on since before she was born.

The issue here is that no matter how many caveats and disclaimers they put in academic papers about “association” and “risk factors”, the midwit clinicians who actually treat the patient will say studies have proven that LC is depression/anxiety. Tuller put it succinctly:

https://twitter.com/davidtuller1/status/1674019187855962114

 

Moved posts

 

That's a great thread from Dr Blitshteyn. Recording —

Also note the response —

https://twitter.com/user/status/1673771978140909570

 

She wrote: "Pieces by mainstream journalists have suggested that linking depression and long COVID is tantamount to accusing all long COVID sufferers of being malingerers."

She references articles by David Tuller and Ed Young which do not really say this. They interviewed patients who have been the victim of people who misinterpret studies that link depression/anxiety to Long Covid as proving the condition is psychosomatic (mainly caused by stress or worry) or less severe.

It is a rather unfair mischaracterization of what they wrote.

 

I think her main argument is that there is too much resistance to mental illness having a causal role in Long Covid because this could actually be the case. But she admits that at present there is no strong evidence for this. So when there is strong evidence there will likely be few resistance to it.

In my view, the resistance is mainly against overstatements of the current evidence to which her piece ironically contributes. She constantly suggests that a correlation might mean causation and what this would imply and criticises other who do not jump to the same conclusion.

 

It is unfortunate that mental illness and stress as a cause of symptoms carry so much stigma. This should not happen, but it does. So if journalists write that illness X is likely caused by mental illness/stress while the evidence is very weak, this will likely be harmful for patients with illness X.

The journalists think they can ignore this and that they carry no responsibility in this. They seem to think that the the stigma is incorrect, not their statements. They should be free to speculate and write about this subject.

I'm not so sure it is that easy. When it comes to the causation of a severe and common illness, a topic that will influence a lot of vulnerable people, you have to make sure that you stick closely to the scientific evidence. Otherwise you are creating illness narratives about how sick people should be viewed and treated, without sound evidence to back it up. Even if well intentioned, this has gone wrong so many times in the past with other illnesses.

If journalists were to write in the same vein about other potential causation - say pesticides or a food preservatives - there would likely be lawsuits for the losses that companies had.