Best articles on ME history

RaviHVJ

RaviHVJ

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I'm making what may be a doomed attempt over the next 8 months to complete the masters degree I've been on a leave of absence from for 4 years. I have to write a "capstone" (a short dissertation), and I've chosen to write it on Long Covid and ME.

I'm going to have a brief overview of the history of ME. What are the best both published and unpublished books and papers on this?

So far, I have Hillary Johnson's two books, A Town for People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the New Yorker, Thirty Years of Disdain (an unpublished but very good manuscript) alongside shorter sources like ME/CFS Skeptic's excellent blog.

I realise this is a broad question, and for this section of the capstone I'll be working primarily from secondary sources - so any suggestions would be very helpful. Given I'm writing it while being on the severe end of moderate, it's not going to be the most impressive or rigorous piece of work, but my intention is to come back to it when I'm stronger and make it publishable.
 
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For the UK, key names that should come up in the story are Simon Wessely, Peter White, Michael Sharpe, Trudie Chalder, Esther Crawley.
Also, in relation to denial of disabilty support for pwME, Waddell and Aylward.

Links with the insurance industry, the Science Media Centre,
The Oxford definition that redefined ME as CFS and only required chronic fatigue, and included fatigue caused by depression and anxiety. The conference and publication where this was decided.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1293107/pdf/jrsocmed00127-0072.pdf
 
You might find Solve ME's CFIDS Chronicle, a newsletter they published from the late 80s to 2010s, to be useful. I've been collecting and digitizing old issues and just finished another set yesterday. I'm up to 66 issues at ~3500 pages, from 1988 to 2007, of the Chronicle and a smaller mid-2000s publication Solve produced called CFS Research Review. I've compiled them all into a couple large PDFs to make it easy to search the lot: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12nqHs37qT2MsOfQ727mTYROvD7Rn91wf?usp=share_link

Incidentally, if anyone has any issues that I don't have that they would like to send me, I would be grateful. I could return once digitized. I would also be interested in other materials that are at risk of loss that anyone thinks are worthy of preservation, whether print materials, photographs, audio/video recordings, or other items. After HHS removed most of the CFSAC meeting videos from Youtube this year, I'm trying to gather and digitize some of the more fragile portions of our history.
 
RaviHVJ said:
I'm particularly interested in articles and books on the history of the biopsychosocial model - I've found a lot more written on the American side of the history than the rise and fall of the more European (and UK) based biopsychosocial model
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...social-model/A31DAA3BED6569F6080A1DF2C1D15A64 I found this more general historical look at the biospychosocial model by S Nassir Ghaemi 2018 very interesting.
This article by Drs Weir and Speight is brief, putting the recent psychosocial dogma in a historical perspective.
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/9/8/984
 
RaviHVJ said:
I'm going to have a brief overview of the history of ME.
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Don't forgot to mention that ME was hijacked twice (3 times if you count the so far unsuccessful redefining of ME as PEM). In 1970 ME was redefined as hysteria then in the late 1980s it was rebranded CFS by the BPS brigade with the focus upon fatigue rather than what Melvin Ramsay originally described.
 
You might want to look at my Qeis article.

For me ME is a defunct concept that was always too muddled to be useful. Basically a confusion of two quite different concepts. Sadly, much of the literature criticising the BPS model is as muddled as the BPS people are, and only serves to perpetuate the confusion.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
You might want to look at my Qeis article.

For me ME is a defunct concept that was always too muddled to be useful. Basically a confusion of two quite different concepts. Sadly, much of the literature criticising the BPS model is as muddled as the BPS people are, and only serves to perpetuate the confusion.
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Ah fantastic - added to the list!
 
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