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Sickness behaviour – useful concept or psycho-humbug?

Discussion in 'General ME/CFS news' started by Woolie, Nov 22, 2017.

  1. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Totally agree with this. In fact I'm mystified where the idea comes from that all behaviour has to be voluntary, or can necessarily be trained out. Some behaviours will be involuntary at the deepest levels. Some involuntary behaviours can possibly be trained out, others not.
     
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  2. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    There are presumably easily confused areas as well. e.g. Shivering/twitching with a high fever?
     
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  3. lansbergen

    lansbergen Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Anybody tried to train out reflexes?
     
  4. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    And that "leap of faith" ( :rolleyes: ) from '3' to '4' is the real travesty. There seems to be this attempted land grab by the psychobabble people, that if it's something in the brain, then it must unconditionally be their territory ... which is b*llocks. There will be a great many physiological brain conditions that '3' is valid for, but which '4' is nonsense. A mindset that basically illustrates why their approach to science is so spurious.
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2017
  5. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Soldiers, police, etc, will have to do it to some degree, as well as sharpen other reflexes. I suspect many professions have to do it to some degree. For instance, though outside my own experience, I believe a survival technique is to not gasp when suddenly immersed into cold water; it is a reflex action that can kill you, but with training can be avoided. Many other such examples I believe. Of course some reflexes would be impossible and deeply unwise to try and change.

    Edit: Just to clarify. I do not for one moment believe that ME is perpetuated by behaviour of any sort. So the notion of fixing ME by some kind of retraining is absurd.
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2017
  6. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Shows that language itself can be at the root of some of this. A word such as "depression" is an umbrella word that covers many variations, but sounds like it means one thing. In-build conflation, ready-made for psychobabblers to exploit.
     
  7. Woolie

    Woolie Senior Member

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    Here's something we should all be aware of.

    Some psychological/behavioural explanations of ME posit that thoughts and behaviours under voluntary control contribute to the illness. These can be modified through standard cognitive-behavioural therapy. For example, patients' beliefs can be challenged and replaced with new ones; their behaviours can be changed by rewarding new behaviours - graded exposure therapy and exercises and the like.

    But cognitive-behavioural therapy and other psychological methods are not limited to thoughts and behaviours under voluntary control. The behavioral part of CBT posits that unconscious, learned propensities can be modified, using techniques of graded exposure and structured rewards for desirable behaviours and such like.

    So a problem could be entirely unconscious and involuntary, but still - in principle - be amenable to therapy.

    When someone posits that a pattern of behaviours is "psychological", they don't necessarily mean its voluntary. What they do mean is that its amenable to intervention on a psychological or behavioural level.

    The idea of sickness behaviour as a potential "cause" for ME is just a click away from a psychological account. It becomes one as soon as you suggest that those behaviours can be modified thorough training.
     
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  8. Adrian

    Adrian Administrator Staff Member

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    I had thought that sickness behavior theories were concerned with signaling between cells to conserve energy to fight bugs rather than anything psychological. I can of course see that some will try to make them brain based and hence suggest they may be amenable to therapy, But it seems to me that if someone really wants to study sickness behaviours they need to look at the messaging systems and cell responses to that.

    I think is would be very hard to do psychological approaches. You can of course persuade people who have a bug to work through it and try to ignore the symptoms but that doesn't mean the symptoms go away and I suspect if you do anything like cognitive function tests they would not get good results.
     
  9. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Agreed, but we sometimes need to be much more careful about "blanket labelling" different things that are sometimes only loosely grouped, with a label that misleads into thinking they are the same thing. Not just talking about people who deliberately conflate issues, but about language itself, and the way language evolves. Once some conflation or other has, literally, become part of the language, confusion occurs inadvertently, which the unscrupulous can then ride on the back of, and exploit and perpetuate.
     
  10. Woolie

    Woolie Senior Member

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    If you go back to the OP here, I did a brief intro to the concept. No, the concept definitely encompasses more than just cellular level stuff.
     
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  11. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I agree with your caution here of course. The big flaw in the BPS thinking is the presumption that ME symptoms are modifiable by the changing of involuntary behaviours. If - and the "if" is all-important here - a situation exists where some latched condition persists due to a vicious circle, symptoms reinforced by behaviour that the symptoms foster, then it may be possible to break that vicious circle by changing the behaviour. But that is absolutely not what ME is! There is no such vicious circle, no more than there is with any other physiological disease. But it suits the BPS crowd to think there is.
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2017
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  12. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Long time ago as a young person I had a great deal of growing up, readjustment and personal sorting out to do. I developed my own version of CBT, before it became the fad, and even longer before I ever heard of it. And it certainly is very helpful if the underlying problems are behaviour driven. But ME is not behaviour driven of course, so CBT is no ******* use at all in fixing it.
     
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  13. Inara

    Inara Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    It most often is in my experience. That's why things must be defined in an exact manner, at least on paper and always in science. When speaking I always try to understand what the person in front me means by the words he uses. It may sound "technical", and most will say: "You cannot speak while defining everything". You should if misunderstandings occurr.

    For me that's the main problem with psycho-language. It is unwell defined, flabby und interpretable. The best definition (irony here) I ever found was the one in DSM V of "psychological illness". It went like "A psychological illness is [...lots of bla bla] a psychological illness [...]".
    Something that calls itself "science" simply mustn't work this way.

    I, too, fear that "sickness behavior" will be another flabby psycho-word in the future.
     
  14. Inara

    Inara Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    The biggest problem with psycho-people is that, often, you cannot argue logically. Well, that's my experience. It's like religion. All the pointing out facts will lead to nowhere, just their stating that what they say is true. The word "true" alone tells everything. It most often gets very personal. There are no proofs at all, all logic and thinking lead to the fact one should be cautious with stating "it's so or so", still psycho-people keep their beliefs.

    And who knows exactly? There seem to be meditative experts who seem to be able to influence anything in their body. It's not a big jump to conclude psychotherapy can do that, too (irony).

    I wouldn't care if they didn't affect others negatively by this. But they do, sometimes massively.
     
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  15. Woolie

    Woolie Senior Member

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    "flabby"!! love it! :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:!
     
  16. Inara

    Inara Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    That's what I understood, too.

    I was told my bodily symptoms resulted from a hidden, underlying conflict that could only be resolved with psychotherapy. (And again, something I know from religion.) I wondered why this could only be achieved by a psychotherapist, why he can unfold my inner mysteries - and I cannot? I think of myself as being reflective. Second, this assumption cannot be proven (and it cannot not be proven).
    How will I know I resolved THE ONE conflict?
    How will I know this conflict is really connected to the symptoms?
    What if in psychotherapy the seemingly conflict was resolved, but the bodily symptoms remain?
    What if the symptoms disappear, but the seemingly conflict does not?
    What if it is thought that the conflict was resolved, the symptoms disappeared, and after a time they return? Is there a new conflict or wasn't THE ONE conflict resolved?
    How will I know the therapist knows?

    I am sure psycho-people will have answers to that like "you didn't believe, ah sorry, work properly", "you tricked", "you were uncooperative", "there must be a hidden trauma in your childhood" and so on.
     
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  17. Hip

    Hip Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Saying "purposely designed by evolution" is just a turn of phrase, to indicate that these traits were selected by Darwinian evolution for their survival benefits.

    Evolution does have purpose and direction though; although evolution uses randomness as a tool to find the best designs for its creatures (natural selection), the direction of evolution is governed by the thermodynamic conditions on Earth — conditions which involve a constant supply of negative entropy from the Sun, which over time will continually push the evolution of living creatures in the direction of increased complexity and order. So in that sense, evolution is purposeful. Without this supply of negative entropy, life would have never evolved into ever more complex life forms, and would never have started at all.

    Darwinian evolution is also guided by intelligent decision-making in higher creatures with brains (sexual selection), which is purposeful rather than random. So in higher creatures, there is intelligence driving a purposeful course of evolution.



    You can such behaviors symptoms if you like, but then you would have to call things like hunger when you stomach is empty, fear when confronted by danger, falling in love when meeting the partner of your dreams, and so forth symptoms as well.

    The idea of the feeling of hunger is that this mental state will modify your behavior, making you search for the food that you need. So hunger creates a behavioral response.
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2017
  18. lansbergen

    lansbergen Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Since when is hunger not a biological process?
     
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  19. Hip

    Hip Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Nobody says it isn't. Are you having difficulty understanding how a biological process can modify behavior? Think about alcohol; this works on a biological basis, acting on receptors in the brain, but everyone knows how in this way alcohol modifies human behavior.
     
  20. lansbergen

    lansbergen Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    NO.
     
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