Understanding Long Covid: Nosology, Social Attitudes and Stigma, 2021, Byrne

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0889159121005560

Brain, Behavior, and Immunity
Available online 23 September 2021


Understanding Long Covid: Nosology, Social Attitudes and Stigma
Eleanor Alexandra Byrne
University of York York, York, United Kingdom
Received 9 July 2021, Revised 14 September 2021, Accepted 18 September 2021, Available online 23 September 2021.

Highlights


•
Social dynamics risk affecting understanding of Long Covid.

•
Stigma plays a role in resisting parallels between Long Covid and CFS/ME.

•
Causal factors which are neither necessary nor sufficient should be equally embraced.

Abstract

The debate around Long Covid has so far shown resistance to accept parallels between Long Covid and a set of existing conditions which have historically been subject to stigma.

This resistance risks endorsing the stigma associated with such existing conditions, and as such, these dynamics of stigma ought to be dismantled in order to facilitate the development of effective clinical resources for all such implicated conditions.

As well as affecting proceedings at the structural level, I discuss how the aforementioned problems also risk affecting patients at the personal level by motivating the reconfiguration and restriction of patient illness narratives.

The problems I identify therefore risk affecting both collective and individual understanding of Long Covid.

 

She wrote this earlier piece that I thought was a bit poor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7426317/

It failed to engage with so many of the specific problems around ME/CFS and claims of expertise from within the medical profession, which is a problem when that's pretty central to the topic she was writing about. She made some fair points, but I felt like her approach contributed to the stigma we face.