Which paper said CBT/GET should encourage participants to no longer see themselves as CFS patients

In the 80s we had local ME groups based on Ramsay defined ME. Some people were quite disabled but as is the way with these groups people had to be able to leave the house to get there!

Deconditioning was not much in evidence, some people were still working and I was not the only mother who did lots of walking every day looking after them.

I had always walked a lot so had good muscles which might have helped but I found it easier to do the 30 minute walk from my mother's (wearing dark glasses and supported by a walking stick or leaning on a pram) than to stand at a bus stop then manoeuvre a pile of change into a small slot (all the while risking having to make conversation through the brain fog)

So there was lots of things wrong with me but an inability to do the recommended amount of walking for health was not one of them.

 

Just found another reference for this, a letter from Prins, Bleijenberg en Van Der Meer in the Lancet. It was a response to the 2001 report by Whiting et al. Wessely & Sharpe were trying to come to some sort of consensus, by stating that "None of the rehabilitation approaches is intended to be curative". But Bleijenbergs team responded aggressively to that suggestion. They wrote:

Just a few lines later they argue that the patients in their trial were actually cured of CFS because they no longer saw themselves as CFS patients

It sounds like a joke but I guess it wasn't intended that way.

 

So if you are a cancer patient and no longer see yourself as a cancer patient, then you are cured of your cancer. If you were to confine definitions of a cancer cure to wholly subjective ones, where people identified if they thought they still had cancer, then they would say no they didn't so voila ... cured of cancer ... neat . The illness definition carefully avoiding, of course, whether patients still had something seriously wrong with them.

 

One can see how this theory might work with ME. Wessely did say something to the effect that that ME was simply a belief, the belief that one had an illness called ME. Clearly if that belief is removed one would be cured. He never said this about CFS though, to the best of my knowledge.

 

Beyond parody. This obsession with "labels" is really weird. They invent a framing and insist it came from us, then use our insistence that it's an invalid framing as some sort of proof of... something. Heads they win, tails we lose.

It would be laughable if the consequences weren't so catastrophic.