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Oh no, I'm worried the headline sets this up to be lampooned. Sounds like something from The Onion. "Woman becomes so angry with the internet that she resorts to reading a book"

Also wanted to say, I don't think this study has much import. It was probably dumped in a Frontiers journal after being rejected from other journals, largely due to the absence of an adequate control condition (waitlisting is well below minimum standard).

Just noticed this, @Three Chord Monty. Who knew that "disease oriented" was a personality style? Hell, end of life care units must be full of people with this personality style. Those folks just can't seem to ignore their disease.

Yea, I've noticed that in FND too, and I think the reason for the greater acceptance of psyc accounts in these areas is that the accounts are more likely to emphasise the role of external events that the person had no control over, like trauma and abuse. So instead of telling the patient that...

Just thinking on it, the idea that autoimmune diseases result from stress has a really dark side: Because these diseases are more common in women, it promotes the idea that women are somehow more psychologically fragile and vulnerable to stress than men.

Speaking of singers and chronic illnesses, a contrasting example comes from Sia, who suffered from chronic severe depression (which is pretty powerfully described in the song Breathe Me below), and eventually discovered she had Graves disease. Treatment for the Graves pretty much resolved the...

No, its considered a therapist-related factor, and its not seen as the responsibility of the client, but there is recognition that some therapists might "click" more with some people than others. I see no problem with the idea that if you go to therapy, you'll have a much better experience if...

There's a term for this, its called "demand characteristics", which is the inclination to affirm the researchers expectations, or to respond in a way that's socially desirable or acceptable. But there are a whole lot of other biases. There is some really nice work by Norbert Schwarz on this. He...

"Therapeutic alliance" is not one of the sources of bias (that's researcher allegiance you're thinking of), its the notion that therapy mainly works via generic mechanisms that related to the quality of the therapist-client relationship. As an idea, it is fine, but the problem is that it is...

Here is the full 19 item list:

Meichenbaum, D., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2018). How to spot hype in the field of psychotherapy: A 19-item checklist. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 49(1), 22. Abstract: Scott Lilienfeld has written some exceptional pieces on the limits of psychotherapy. He recently passed away, a...

How embarrassing for all of us. I appreciate that she is probably motivated by "good intentions", but whether she did it intentionally or not, she has effectively leveraged the neglect and suffering of PwMEs as a platform to promote her ideas. Which makes me mad as hell. Actually, no, "good...

Oh, and not to mention, as @rvallee says, you need a consistent, objective criterion for deciding whether someone has experienced significant trauma that's not contaminated by their current health status, and you need to rule out confounds (such as gender).

Yes and the opposite is true too. Many people who've led absolutely shit lives, who been raped or attacked or repeatedly abused or even trafficked, don't end up with fibro, or any sort of chronic health condition. As my other half always says, don't forget to consider all four cells:

Interesting article, Graham. I use sleep medication pretty regularly, because my experience is that even mild sleep deprivation (even 1 hour less than I need) will exacerbate my muscle pain in particular. To me, it seems incredibly unlikely that I am somehow generating this muscle pain inside...

Totally, @Arnie Pye, @Sean! I've just finished reading about work conditions for domestic workers in Europe 100 years ago. They were up so early and in bed so late, they barely got time to sleep. A lot did heavy physical labour much of the day as well. Plus people commonly died from things that...

Like you say, it depends on what you mean by stress. But if you think of stress as some sort of specific challenge or set of challenges that the person/body has to rise to (which I think its a fair definition), and the stress response is the changes people initiate to meet this challenge, then...

This. If you want to claim hope can improve bodily function (or that despair or stress can do the opposite), you must specify the mechanism by which such factors operate, and also specify the conditions under which they do and don't have the predicted effect. Whenever "stress" and "mind-body...

Sorry, just can't let this go. "Refining" they say. "Refining"! What a bald faced lie.

I'm actually SO ANGRY about this case report. How did it ever get published? How can you possibly argue that someone with PSP, a degenerative disorder with significant neuropsychiatric features, has "functional overlay"? What would this even look like? Why can't these people fully admit that...