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

True, but I suspect there is also dissociation happenning here: she is so fixated on retorts to defend what she has said that she isn't capable of stepping back to see why on earth she is saying it in the first place. Like someone who causes havoc in order to 'get x' without stopping to think whether they actually either want or need it - and I've observed a scary number of people who get caught in that issue/habit these days. And luckily it is something that CBT would be a good model, if it were of the type that is properly scientifically done, to address such issues in such people. 'step back before you kneejerk and go into defend or fight and think* "what is it that I'm defending" '.

So naivity and having been hoodwinked. I'm almost at the point of feeling for words like 'patsy' or 'gopher' to take it to the new generation who aren't aware it is just an old-fashioned excuse from dated people who did a dated paradigm that never worked and ergo 'it seems like it makes sense to those in today's world/isn't old and dated thinking being pushed forward in a manifesto written by a dated niche'.

I see all of this nonsense 'paradigm' [it isn't, it is a fake truism charading, and most importantly is about as maximum non-committal to specifics or anything falsifiable as a statement as you get] as something that basically came from the PACE lot (and of course those who've jumped into the industry because they like 'motivating people' and don't want a 'pander and support' job) flunking and ducking the 'come to Jesus moment'.

That's what it is all about: embarrassing denial and inability to take it on the chin of the generation before her - which in previous academic decades would have been what the youngsters coming through would have seen as their fodder to overturn, improve on and set right. You normally go into a subject with fresh eyes to see where you can 'add' and be objective rather than to join the religion so to speak, unless it is a profession.

It is classic rewrite history and trying to backtrack on your own flawed model: 'but you have to admit that some psychological something can sort of be part of anything sort of' in response to their whole idea - which was that the illness could be CURED by things like pushing people in a swimming pool to convince them they could actually move, as well as being pushed to hurt your body 'because we won't hear that you still did exercise and used it, it must be because you deconditioned by doing less' fell into as a fallacy and delusion.

And if you are an academic with the access to get manifestos and articles published and do your business by rhetoric against straw men then you churn out a load of papers that are based on even less method than the ones before even feigned. But they were just covers, just misogynisty type people writing back-covering claiming 'it was only ever really rehab' and 'we just meant x' to try and pretend they weren't really wrong.

And this woman has obviously come into the subject at a point where that is her teachers - people who are required to give up to date learning but were a major part of delivering that several decade wrong paradigm and don't have it in them to eat their words. And how do you cover how non-science and manifesto-based it is other than taking out the methods part of the subject or teaching dodgy versions based on inference and just making your 'evidence' a load of one-liner retorts that aren't meaningful at all? So sadly that is probably what she has learned and thinks the subject is. And people 'model' on those who go before them unless they are real ground-breakers who question what they are being taught.

So it's pretty worrying for the future of certain subjects to see people like this, hopefully it is just a twitter-attracted-type thing. I'm not a fan of it because you have to be pretty happy to groundhog day a very simplisic and limited argument for however long on end for stuff like this, and I don't get how that's worthy anyone's time other than if you are seeking huge amounts of very shallow validation from likes and yeps.

What happened to teachers who wanted to prep their followers to be better than them and in critical evaluation, rather than to just train a generation of adherents learned by rote not to disagree. It feels like an indicator of a real flaw with the subject when it shows deficiency in the skills and approach/attitude the next generation are being taught to have.


There used to be different skills in the progress through academic stages where people have to first be able to understand the literature, then seek the different viewpoints to understand the complexities and debates, then understand the methodologies so you actually understand which ones are 'moot/not really debates', then be able to criticially evaluate.

By that point (around end of UG and into masters) you should be critically evaluative on methods specifically before you even begin an essay where you will be arguing that perspective (based on it).

Often then into later academics as you become allied to certain areas and schools then you might be arguing first more.

But aping that without doing the homework/main work part first seems to be an increasing problem. It is great to be able to have the skills of arguing and debating in an academic forum, but if it isn't based on that initial knowledge and seeking to further knowledge then it is 'just arguing for the sake of it' or 'pushing a manifesto'? Well it is skipping the real meaning of debate, which is supposed to be in your own mind first having read the literature etc. not about joining 'a team' early on then defending for the sake of it.

 

This is so common in these articles.

They want to say it's psychosomatic, encounter criticism, then redefine their own position into some vague statement about psychological factors that's hard to disagree with even if one has to guess what is actually meant. Obviously sick people do experience negative emotions about being ill but that wasn't the original claim. And if someone believes this is what psychosomatics, FND or the CBT used in ME are meant to address then they're misinformed.

 

Rereading the article I get the impression that the author is trying to say something about the importance of mental health while not having a good understanding of things, and bizarrely picking the worst possible illnesses to use as background for this.

 

It's the exact same argument for astrology. Stars and planets absolutely influence life on earth. Not as claimed, not individual lives, but they do. No one can dispute that, especially the Sun. Doesn't make astrology real anymore than the same argument makes psychosomatics real. It's the worst argument anyone can put together: it can happen, you can't prove it's not, therefore it always is. It's genuinely one of the most insane things in the world that millions of lives, and billions of life years, are sacrificed to something this mediocre.

 

Does someone know how to unroll my twitter thread into a block of text? That way I could post on FB or VB. thanks!

https://twitter.com/user/status/1675071769479094273

 

Copy and paste of text from this thread unroll, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1675071769479094273.html. Does not include the links that you posted in some tweets.

 

Wow, thanks!

 

Dave Tuller on Twitter has tweeted
"This article is highly problematic, as I noted when it was published. The author argues FND is like a brain "software" issue and that I have misinterpreted the science. Our comment in @statnews serves as a rebuttal."

Dave et al article,
Functional neurological disorder is not an appropriate diagnosis for people with long Covid

"Long Covid — the name adopted for cases of prolonged symptoms after an acute bout of Covid-19 — is an umbrella diagnosis covering a broad range of clinical presentations and abnormal biological processes. Researchers haven’t yet identified a single or defining cause for some of the most debilitating symptoms associated with long Covid, which parallel those routinely seen in other post-acute infection syndromes. These include overwhelming fatigue, post-exertional malaise, cognitive deficits (often referred to as brain fog), and extreme dizziness.

Given the current gaps in knowledge, some neurologists, psychiatrists, and other clinicians in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere have suggested that an existing diagnosis known as functional neurological disorder (FND) could offer the best explanation for many cases of this devastating illness."

https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/15/long-covid-not-functional-neurological-disorder/

 

Good.