Wired Magazine: The Painful Truth About Long Covid by Alan Levinovitz, 2026

Yann04 said:
FFS, thanks to this article someone close to me is now suggesting „recovery coaching“ again.
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Ah, that's so distressing!
I'm sorry you have to handle that on top of being very severely ill!

Next time someone recommends brain retraining to me, I'll tell them that I am one of the 75 recoverees* from the Goldsmith Report but that my coaching business hasn't flourished as expected and whether they would consider recommending my services to someone close to them with a chronic illness.
You gotta give the love back!

*
Sean said:
"Recovery is not always about eliminating all symptoms. Rather, it is a nexus between the reality of limited opportunities for full recovery, yet a strong desire to leave the illness behind and regain a sense of ‘normality.’"
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V.R.T. said:
The strain that psychobabble puts on relationships and the harm it causes is immeasurable.
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This may be the worst and cruelest of all the consequences of the psychobabblers unjustified intrusion and interference in our lives. In no small part because it is also one of the most unnecessary, foreseeable, and preventable.

If any people in this world should know the dangers of such an approach to personal relationships and support, and why those relationships are so critical to patients survival and welfare, it should be psychosocial 'experts'. Yet here they are, deliberately poisoning and destroying those relationships, those last remaining lifelines for patients.

I think this stuff is genuinely evil, and the ones who do it to children are the most evil of them all, and I will never forgive them for any of it.

Looking straight at you, Esther Crawley. You might have retired and slunk off into the shadows for now to try minimising exposure and accountability for your central role in all this, but it has not been forgotten. We still remember. The children and families you did this to can never forget that trauma.
 
From In the Expectation of Recovery:

The responsibility to expect recovery
During a House of Lords debate on the abolition of Disability Living Allowance and its
replacement with Personal Independent Payments, Lord Freud, Minister for Welfare
Reforms at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), stated that:
"we have gone for the biopsychosocial model. That model has now garnered very
significant academic support, as those noble Lords to whom I sent that very
interesting piece of research will recognise."[14]
The circulated document had been written by Mansel Aylward and Gordon Waddell[15].
At the time of the debate Aylward, a former DWP chief medical officer, ran the Unum
Provident Centre for Psychosocial and Disability Research[16] while sitting on Atos
Healthcare's Clinical Governance Board.[17] He had helped develop LiMA, the software
used in Atos's disability assessments.[18] Their document laid out the biopsychosocial
model and explained that this model promoted a new conception of the 'sick role' which
served to dramatically increase the responsibilities of those living with health problems, stating that "there needs to be a fundamental shift in the culture that surrounds work and health, sickness and disability, and incapacity benefits.
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The biopsychosocial model allowed the banal observation that psycho-social factors
play an important role in how people feel and behave to be used as an excuse for dramatic
changes in the way the state interacts with those who have disabilities and ill health, even
though all human experience will include a psychological and social component. Those
with 'common health problems' are told that they must now recognise that "rehabilitation
depends on your own motivation and effort" and new obligations for these patients are
listed, such as:

"Recognize that the sick role is temporary, in the expectation of recovery
Be motivated and cooperate with rehabilitation"

So what are 'common health problems' and how good is the evidence that the rehabilitative approaches patients supposedly have a responsibility to engage in truly
lead to the recovery which we are now told they should expect? The document cites a
DWP report, also co-authored by Gordon Waddell, Concepts of rehabilitation for the
management of common health problems. [19] Here it is claimed that 'common health
problems' "cause most long-term disability and incapacity" and "often consist primarily of
symptoms with limited evidence of objective disease or impairment" while "the obstacles
to recovery are often predominantly psychosocial in nature rather than the severity of
pathology or impairment."
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Sean said:
Looking straight at you, Esther Crawley. You might have retired and slunk off into the shadows for now to try minimising exposure and accountability for your central role in all this, but it has not been forgotten. We still remember. The children and families you did this to can never forget that trauma.
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And EC had the backing of the State. From the same Report:

Research Distorted
by Politics
Cruel to be kind
"Behavioural approaches try to extinguish observed illness behaviour by withdrawal of negative reinforcements such as medication, sympathetic attention, rest, and release from duties, and to encourage healthy behaviour by
positive reinforcement: ‘operant-conditioning’ using strong feedback on progress."
Waddell and Burton[19]

Emphasising the role that reversible psychosocial factors play in benefit claimants'
disability allows politicians to present plans to 'slash' welfare spending as a 'moral mission' to help people overcome a culture of dependency.[110-122] Claiming that changes to disability benefits are needed to account for 'today's understanding of disability', supported by the work of medical researchers, helps politicians sidestep important moral and political debates, even if the research is poor and the results misrepresented.
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Sean said:
The whole governance system is in it up to their necks, which is a major barrier to actually fixing it. Coz they all have to admit to being willingly conned and inflicting terrible harm for no good reason.
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the crux of one of our dilemmas right there - how can an off-ramp (term nicked from @Amw66 ) be provided for those who weren't driving it but got made part of it inadvertently to the point that they might get defensive even if they don't intend to (we all do it, even when we aren't that way and actively try not to in our daily lives, even more so in those who aren't that way).

I see it all over the place in the history where things like people having to buy in a service and getting told 'it will save you money at any cost' then can't go back to their partners in their workplace they told that to and admit it didn't because it was their buy etc. . There needs to be a route that means that same person feel proud to have kept an eye on it and been cynical and said 'well... it didn't turn out that way' etc. or ideally that requires someone else to be crunching said numbers?

Whilst at the same time the solution certainly isn't just sacrificing those harmed and pretending it wasn't that bad as some sop to make people [who aren't the real injured parties but apologies are 'awkward' for 5mins, and they need to remember that compared to having your life wrecked and watching those part of doing it not being able to swallow 5mins to allow the rest of it to be survivable] feel better. Instead the biggest victims get the biggest wrath again 'because it wouldn't be a problem if the harmed didn't exist'. And that does become incredibly scary, as non-logic, but some sell it.

Which leaves them with another practical injury because what then gets lobbed on them is that they are again treated as if they weren't injured by something done to them but get to be put thru another hell of 'oh no it doesn't get this bad if it is just cfs why, it must be something else weird with you' meaning those who should be most apologised to get an even worse hell landing on them, instead of 'sorry, we didn't mean it to end this way but we do acknowledge what that meant on the receiving end actually exists and take responsibility for our part and so will change what can happen for the future' type thing.
 
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“WIRED Ethics Complaint Update: LC/ME/CFS advocate & attorney Scott Hugo, who leads an ethics complaint backed by many ME/CFS/LC groups, calls out @WIRED & Condé Nast for paying to re-promote article recycling discredited ideas, & risking patient harm”

www.linkedin.com

Where’s the Shame, WIRED?

Why is your publication still paying to promote “The Painful Truth,” despite allegations of serious ethics violations? An Open Letter to the Leadership and Staff of WIRED and Condé Nast: Imagine being so sick that you are confined to your bed, one grueling day after another. Imagine documenting seri
www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
 
Maat said:
From In the Expectation of Recovery:
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“Lord Freud, Minister for Welfare
Reforms at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), stated that:
‘we have gone for the biopsychosocial model.’”

Wait his name is actually Lord Freud? I was expecting a bit lmao. In a way this guy is like the perfect incarnation of the dark side of Sigmund Freud’s legacy
 
It’d be interesting if there was a quiz boffin type who could tell us just how many MPs now and recently history are basically descendants of famous individuals like that - another was Churchill grandson etc

It gives me food for thought when I realise that sort of thing …

And House of Lords seems to be very much about that until they maybe changed it a little bit it was lifetime peers that I think could get handed down which likely connects families in to knowing about politics and knowing those involved in it so probably more likely some in younger generation go into it etc
 
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