"Acedia"

https://twitter.com/user/status/1035202928217350144


I wasn't sure where to post this.
It is not a term I'm familiar with. Perhaps others can decide whether many of the people who had been diagnosed with it could have had ME/CFS.

 

@Dolphin - Interesting...... Thanks for posting this!

 

That is very interesting, but it sounds more like existential "angst" rather than CFS. The idea of accompanying restlessness does not seem to fit easily.

Don't tell Wessely about this, or his next book will feature everyone from Kirkegaard to Camus.

 

The guy who's posted it seems to think ME 'has a lot in common with depression', although patients would deny it. *sigh* And he's supposedly a smart, open-minded writer.

 

Aldous Huxley on Accidie aka melancholy, boredom, ennui, despair.

Excerpts from "On the margin"

''The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many demons. Most of these evil spirits cam furtively with the coming of night. But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid to walk by day. The holy men of the desert called him the dæmon meridianus; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the day...

...Throughout the Middle Ages this demon was known as Acedia, or, in English, Accidie. Monks were still his favourite victims, but he made many conquests among the laity also...

...Accidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was also subject to it. We find a copious description of the symptoms of acedia in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy...

...The Spleen was published in the ‘thirties of the eighteenth century. Accidie was still, if not a sin, at least a disease. But a change was at hand. “The sin of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped tristitia,” became a literary virtue, a spiritual mode. .

...It is a very curious phenomenon, this progress of accidie from the position of being a deadly sin, deserving of damnation, to the position first of a disease and finally of an essentially lyrical emotion, fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern literature...

...The mal du siècle was an inevitable evil; indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondrias; it is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us.''

https://mindyourmaker.wordpress.com...accidie-aka-melancholy-boredom-ennui-despair/

 

I don't think it is ME, we may be tired but we experience frustration at what we can't do, not a feeling that nothing is worth while.

I get sad at my situation, but I don't like to refer to it as depression because once or twice I have experienced a feeling that was real depression. Like accidie, I felt it was a world without hope, a landscape without water. I NEVER want to experience it again and if I get a twinge of it round the edges I fight it hard.