UK: LBC phone in on ME 8pm, 24th August 2024

As someone who is a neurotic perfectionist, it totally fucked up my academic and creative careers because nothing I did was ever good enough. I was always dismissing what I had created or achieved and trying to do something better, so I never got anything done.

But I never saw myself as a perfectionist until a psychologist told me because people think perfectionists have it all together.

True perfectionism is actually really detrimental to achieving success.

 

Agree, BPS language about this is designed to manipulate both patients and the public and its deliberate.

 

A mark of perfectionism is becoming disproportionately upset when things don’t work out or go your way.
Getting upset in front of a BPS about feeling unwell and not being able to work/exercise/socialise is therefore, to them, evidence of perfectionism.

As is having a life including work, exercise and socialising, showing the kind of Type A personality wanting do “do it all” and overdo it, wanting to achieve in different spheres.

They really just overlay the theories on to our circumstances any way they can.

 

Unfortunate. You could hear the damage wrought by therapists previously convincing him that this is what underlay his situation.

"People pleasers". But also "life-threatening militant activists".

Maybe the disease could be renamed "Schrödinger's syndrome" as we're so often said to be simultaneously polar opposites across multiple domains. Although we might also self-define as being both alive and dead, as I think was also articulated in the programme.

Spoiler: Profanity

If anyone tried to tell me this was because I was a people pleaser I would respond with "a people pleaser wouldn't tell you to 'go fuck yourself'." Although to be fair I would say it with a slight smile on my face.

 

perfect!

 

@SNT Gatchaman wrote: ....

'Unfortunate. You could hear the damage wrought by therapists previously convincing him that this is what underlay his situation.
"People pleasers". But also "life-threatening militant activists".

Maybe the disease could be renamed "Schrödinger's syndrome" as we're so often said to be simultaneously polar opposites across multiple domains. Although we might also self-define as being both alive and dead, as I think was also articulated in the programme.'


THIS -

 

I don't want to pile on this caller. I also cringed at the things he was saying but we need to be careful to not discourage people from sharing their harrowing experiences of this illness just because they don't advocate in quite the right way. This person is likely just repeating nonsense he heard at the Optimum Health Clinic which he also mentioned and from therapy-speak so pervasive in our society now.

Overall, I was really happy with how many callers acknowledged that mental illness is also real and this isn't about creating a hierarchy of diseases, it's simply saying that ME/CFS isn't a psychosomatic condition which can be thought or exercised out of. This approach gives no ammunition to SW et al.

 

Absolutely!

He did very well, not his fault at all, it takes huge courage to call in and make yourself vulnerable, I know I couldnt do it!

I'm going to edit my post to make sure it's clear i not critisising the caller!

Yes I noted that too. Very good

 

Same. I marvelled at how well-spoken the callers were. I could never!

 

It's something I could've said at some point, before learning better. This forum does a great job in educating, but it also might give a distorted vision of reality because people are so well educated about ME here. Most people I come across in real life don't know about how our words are constantly twisted against us.

In an ideal world they also wouldn't have to know, because people like Wessely would make way for the people that are genuinely trying to help us.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1830512255936483810

 

I hope more of her colleagues pick it up then. Would be of great help if there'd finally be a good counter to the BPS narrative.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1840130671408279613

 

Raises all sorts of awkward questions about how this obvious public interest story was held back. The demand to know more, to improve things is there from the public. Not everyone, but there are many stories that get loads of attention that much fewer people care about. But the people responsible for it had no intention of doing so, and some of them we know have acted to kill stories at the editorial level despite this obviously being in the public interest and being highly newsworthy. A cover up, because they were protecting their own malfeasance. Whether or not they actually believed them is totally irrelevant.

Like most things, I assume that once we know even half of the story, everything in context will make it so much worse, and it's already been at Catholic church rape scandal level of awful for years, but if most of it was already in the news media, but ignored anyway. Many scandals that reached national attention in many countries were much less serious than this, and this one is a global scandal affecting one of the biggest industries on the planet.

Because of course the same is true at the institutional level within health care. A constant baseline demand about something that is supposed to be a legal right. Always refused or sabotaged despite not only clear demand but technically a legal mandate. A legal mandate that is clearly inadequately enforced.

There is for sure at least one Nobel prize in medicine here. Possibly more than one, my intuition is that it will open a flood of new knowledge about illness itself, about the physiology of symptoms and their biological mechanisms. But there is also very likely a few journalism awards in there, Pulitzer-level and multiple ones at that because the same story repeated itself in every country, in every health care system.