#ThereForME campaign / Building an NHS that’s there for Long Covid and ME

She's very good. You can see the strain of talking but she makes her points clearly.

 

Oonagh is consistently brilliant in interviews. I hope Oonagh also reads some of our threads here and in case she does: a huge Thank You for all you're doing.

Also welcome and brava @Karen Hargrave and very best wishes to you and your husband

 

3-minute clip on Sky News’ Twitter. It would be good if that could be shared so they see interest in topic.

 

So excellent. And the interviewer made very good points too. Powerful messages.

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The link just takes me to the general Sky website, and I can't find it as a story. It's one of those sites where if a Search function exists at all, they hide it pretty bloody well.

 

I just clicked on the picture in post 180 and got the video.

Oonagh is excellent, as everyone says.
It is time some members of the Royal College of Physicians took notice of what she is saying.
Time a medical specialty admitted that somebody needs to provide long term support.

 

Great clip really well communicated, which is difficult to do.

My only suggestion would be that it's not so much it is/was thought to be 'psychological,' as it is that symptoms are 'made up' consciously or unconsciously because pwME are either crazy or lazy and for some kind of secondary gain like not having to work.

I'm not really sure what the best way to communicate that simply and concisely is. I mention this just to avoid the possibility of accidentally pitting mental health issues against physical ones. Maybe saying 'psychosomatic' instead of 'psychological' is clearer.

 

Sky News Segment LongCovid ME/CFS (youtube.com)

 

Thanks, @Sly Saint!

 

I think the handling of the interview was fine. For most people 'an illness being psychological' is different from it being psychiatric or a mental health problem. I think the former is generally understood as psychosomatic or thereabouts.

 

That was excellent. Hard to make so many small points spanning the whole issue and its history but this was as good as it gets, plain, direct and very well-informed.

 

Which speciality has claimed Long Covid?

I love how “thought to be psychological” is always spoken of in the past sense. “We’re smarter than that type of thinking, aren’t you?”

 

I think the clinics have had input from several specialties, including infectious diseases and respiratory, but the bulk of work has probably been done by therapists. And I think everyone has assumed that once Covid fizzles out and enthusiasm wanes the clinics will close down. Nobody has claimed it.

 

No one particular specialty - mix of Occupational therapists, respiratory therapists, respiratory medicine, some GPs with special interest.

 

it also doesn't emphasise what a malign type of 'psychology' we are talking about under this term. I can't say I could better it (or that it would be appropriate unless a one-liner in the context and point being made), but it's one of those conundrums of quite how you can get across that really truly there are a bunch of people who've spent decades making up nonsense research to suggest 'it's our personality' from any angle possible and that their 'treatment' was 're-education' aka brainwashing to 'act normal' so noone had to put up with us seeming disabled as that is unacceptable, not that any form of anything that bunch work on wouldn't be disgustingly harmful and wrong of course. And make up who we are which adds another extreme injury on top of being so ill, isolation of the type noone can begin to imagine - because you get de-existed and even you as a person with the history of you being rewritten out.

 

I’m happy for the “general public” who didn’t know much about ME/CFS to hear it wasn’t researched properly because it was thought to be psychological, but we know it’s biomedical. Also it can be very serious and deadly. Thats enough for now. The “post office scandal” type public inquiry can come later.

 

Always. And it's really pissing me off that it's pretty much always. I almost never notice framing that it's an ongoing scandal, even in writen articles you get a tone that things used to be this way, but have changed since. In a rapid conversation you can understand it, it goes so quickly, but in writing it's a different matter.

The bigger scandal is that it's still happening, but that's just part of the bigger scandal that psychosomatic ideology has never been more influential than it is today, while most people think this stuff ended in the 80s. The bad stuff anyway, psychologizing legitimate diseases. Psychologizing disputed illnesses? Well that's the same thing but with the difference of hindsight. Which is purely a matter of perception, which illnesses are disputed, but when it comes to psychosomatic ideology, it literally always is all perception anyway.

Seriously I think that most people think this doesn't happen anymore. As in at all. But if you point out examples like us, they're considered OK. Just like it used to be when asthma, MS and others were psychologized. Funny how that works, ever-shifting goalposts.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1838860040729440482

 

But she did talk about that generation of doctors trained the wrong way. She did acknowledge we’re still facing that nonsense.