NZ Listener - Ills thought out - Wilson 2019

One is immediately suspicious of a title like "Ills thought out". Too clever by half. Perhaps that is where all the effort went. Clearly indicates the authors "thinking".

 

You're a star

 

Good letter @Hutan. It seems that you and @Ravn are doing some excellent advocacy work in New-Zealand.

 

Pretty taken aback by this article. By a colleague in my own department too. I've also sent a letter. Its way too long, but I'm hoping they might give me special dispensation as a fellow psychologist!

 

Well done @Hutan great letter!

& @Carolyn Wilshire thank you for talking to your colleagues in this wonderful way. Great to see a psychologist making sense.
With your permission i would like to copy it & print it out to give to a psychotherapist i may meet with to see if they can give me some support through some difficult life circumstances I'm currently experiencing. It debunks a lot of the nonsense in a short piece & written by a fellow psych professional it will carry more weight than my own opinions. If she is interested I will obviously link her in to read your main studies & work, but as an intro it would be so helpful.

 

This is the TL;DR of problems with this research. The entire body of research exists in that space, mixed in with cherry-picking random correlation and declaring it causative. By their broken reasoning shivering is what makes us cold.

It's absurd that this point has to be made over and over again but thank you for taking the time to make it loud and clear to your, uh, logically-challenged colleagues.

 

Thank you. I do hope they print it. Ideally as a guest columnist in place of Wilson in the next edition

Or maybe it at least gives them the idea to do a bigger - and more informed! - feature on ME one day? Maybe David Tuller's visit later in the year could provide a suitable occasion?

 

Particularly disappointing is that Wilson in previous columns expressed great concern - genuine I believe - for the mental welfare of young people constantly exposed to all sorts of pressures and messages of unattainable ideals.

Yet here he seems oblivious to the potentially damaging effect of his message that if you're ill with CFS it's because you're too perfectionistic or too depressed or too anxious or too all-or-nothing or just generally don't think right. He might argue he's talking about % risk increase but the message readers get is "you're all wrong as a person if you have CFS". How helpful is that going to be to a young person already struggling with serious illness?

Even if Wilson actually believes Moss-Morris' research conclusions to be valid (which would suggest that either he didn't actually read her article or that he doesn't understand methodology - and he definitely doesn't understand ME) - even if he did write in good-faith ignorance, it was still irresponsible to write the way he did.

 

My PEM must be lifting at last. At least I managed to write a letter to the Listener expressing my dismay at Wilson's piece and suggesting they contact @Carolyn Wilshire and @dave30th for a future feature to make up for Wilson's misstep.

My letter wasn't the sort to be published but more a letter of complaint crossed with a tip off for a story. I figured it was a good idea to approach the issue from different angles and since we already have two letters to the editor, thanks again @Hutan and @Carolyn Wilshire, I decided on a different tack.

Took all day but I got there, phew. And always feels good to achieve that first proper and completed task when emerging from PEM.

 

Just chiming in here - also as a psychologist . This kind of pop psychology that gets perpetuated, in my opinion discredits our profession. The two things that are most important to the profession are that we use science (evidence) to inform our practice and that we do no harm. No scientist should take information out of context and report it as if it has some merit.

 

That's funny - and embarrassing for the author. But surely this needs to be viewed more differentially, like it's unhelpful to pretend it's not happening and helpful to pretend it's not happening. (Sarcasm)

 

Welcome @Gretel. Good to have you here.

 

Sooo... people with ME simultaneously catastrophise about what's happening and also pretend its not happening... they simultaneously lack perseverance and try way too hard... they simultaneously do too little exercise and overdo activities... these simultaneous paradoxical states are just doing my head in...

 

It all makes sense! The CBT/GET model is a patient blaming device and it works very well: no patient is without blame in this model, because anything they do is wrong.

The solution for patients that do it wrong is of course CBT.