BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

[Mithriel]

One problem is that there is a lot of stress in people's lives, in fact we get bored if there is not any! It is our response to stress that is the key and that has been forgotten along the way.

When I was sent to see a psychologist (they lied about it or I would not have gone) I was in the middle of some very stressful situations I had not control over. Bit the documents she gave me to read made me realise that I was doing exactly the right thing, sorting out the things I could and stepping back from everything else, worrying at the day's problems not tomorrow's.

The other, glaring fact is that very few people do not have any stress in their life at any given point so something can be dredged up as the answer to everything.

They keep talking about the mind and body being interconnected and the mind causing bodily symptoms. If they believe that why do they think sorting out the mind will have more effect on disease than sorting out the problems in the body that stress has caused?

They know that psoriasis is made worse by stress and know the scientific reason - immune cells migrate to the upper levels of the skin probably as an evolutionary defence against dying from a wound. Yet psoriasis is best treated by emollients, vitamin D, light and methotrexate, not CBT.

 

[rvallee]

A paywalled article about Long Covid in children yesterday in one of Norway's tabloid newspapers, VG.

It tells the story of a 15 year old girl who has postviral fatigue after Covid-19 and is now doing quite poorly. She is no longer able to go to school.

Several doctors and researchers have been interviewed, including one from the BPS milieu.
(hastily translated):

Paediatrician, Bård Fossli Jensen, has seen it again and again:
Children and adolescents, often strong willed and hard working, becoming bed bound after an infection.
The blood tests are fine. There is nothing to see on X-rays of the brain, the lungs or the heart.
But still the children are so ill that they're not able to get through everyday life without help.

- These stories are completely tragic. But it's important to understand that we've seen such symptoms again and again. It's nothing new or mysterious about Covid-19, says Fossli Jensen, who speaks about this in a general sense.

Why some don't recover after an infection, is complex, but necessary for parents to understand, the doctor believes:

- The brain and the body are the most complex in the whole universe, so no-one knows exactly how this works together. Me neither. But we know there is a type of stress-response that is activated in those who have long term illness.

Fossli Jensen explains:
- Imagine that you, as many others, are stressing a bit more than you really should in your everyday life.
You don't actually need to feel stressed, but there might be some things that are bothering you, and when you ought to rest, you pull your straps up instead.
Then you get an infection in the body.

It could be Covid-19, or mononucleosis, that knocks you out. Maybe you get fever or a sore throat, and you stay put in bed.

Then, when the virus leaves the body, the fever stops. But you're still not feeling well. It could for instance be fatigue that's still lingering.

- We who work with unexplained medical symptoms, as Long Covid pr definition is, know the reason for why you're not feeling better: It's because the body is trying to protect you against returning to the stressful situation you were in before the infection.

(...)

It's a completely normal defence mechanism, explains Fossli Jensen.

It's just as natural as pulling your hand away from a hot stove. No matter how strong willed you are.

- Covid-19 can trigger that you are feeling fatigue, but Corona is not the cause for not recovering afterwards.

- So in theory if I had had a completely stress free life before Corona, you say I wouldn't develop Long Covid?

- Yes, in principle yes. It has to be that this comes on top of everything. The final drop.

He quickly continues:
- And then people are asking me: So you mean the symptoms are all in the head?

Fossli Jensen answers his own question.
- No! To separate mind and body is an old and meaningless way to think in medicine. The symptoms are completely, completely real.

Amazing. They literally say "no one knows how this works", followed by "here's how this works", explicitly naming stress. Amazing doublethink. They point at their failure making any progress as a success story, as if they know how to deal with this, even as it's painfully clear to long hauler how clueless and paralyzed by ignorance medicine is.

This is exactly how a con works. Details are irrelevant, all that matters is confidence that you know what you're doing. And in this case there is massive widespread abuse of statutory authority to make it grease its way unhindered.

Literally as impressive as the fossil fuel industry pointing at their pathetic efforts to blame consumers, "your personal carbon footprint", and pretend they are working to solve the problem, with more of the problem.

The whole dismantling medicine's credibility at the same time it is explicitly needed is impressively insane. Way to go, people, I saw this today and it's the best description I have seen of this hubristic nonsense:

 

[Arnie Pye]

I dont like this much. There is a lot of unsubstantiated theory flying around about stress and ME onset even in ME circles.

Talking about stress as the cause of anything is always an idea I consider to be very "slippery", and it is a short word that is much, much too convenient for doctors and society to trot out and use to dismiss people. Someone who loses their job and knows that they are unlikely to get a new one is going to be much more stressed than someone who expects and gets a new job within a month. Suffer from stress in this situation (of looking for a job and not finding one) for more than a couple of months and people will find themselves being described as depressed, anxious, and mentally ill by family, friends, doctors etc. even though they have never been so described before.

What causes stress? There are lots and lots of ways it can be caused, some common, some not so common, but doctors seem to concentrate solely on the invisible things they can blame on the patient, such as depression and anxiety. I think that stress can be caused by a far broader range of things than people generally think of, and some of them can be fixed if the will and the finances are there. Some of them may disappear with time e.g. grief.

Just a few things that come to mind (in no particular order) that must be stressful to some degree (and in some cases to an extreme degree) - and the list can never be complete.

Grief
Being bullied, physically, emotionally, at work, at home, at school, at any age
Being poor
Over-exercising and under-exercising
Being underfed or overfed or eating a poor quality diet
Getting too little (or too much?) sleep
Being nutritionally deficient
Having a long-term or life-long invisible illness
Going blind and/or deaf
Losing body parts, whether by surgery or by accident or by illness
Being disbelieved about something very important to you, even though you are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Having an accident
Being tortured
Being in pain which is not believed in and is therefore left untreated for years

So, I'm always dubious (and shocked) about stress being blamed for anything health related. I usually assume it means I am being disbelieved and dismissed, and I won't get treated.

 

[Sly Saint]

 

[Kalliope]

Just came across this on Twitter

Here is the full proposal. There are several references to papers by Chalder and Moss-Morris

the british psychological society: Campaign theme - Development and promotion of valid psychological screening to predict chronicity, post COVID-19 infection

quote:
A cognitive-behavioural model, first described by Surawy et al in 1995 has been successful in predicting the transition from acute to chronic states in a number of health conditions. This model has been shown to predict chronic fatigue syndrome following glandular fever, irritable bowel syndrome from campylobacter infection and post-concussional syndrome following mild head injury.

______________
This is discussed further on British Psychological Society: Development and promotion of valid psychological screening to predict chronicity, post COVID-19 infection, 2021

 

[boolybooly]

I'm always dubious (and shocked) about stress being blamed for anything health related. I usually assume it means I am being disbelieved and dismissed, and I won't get treated.

Yes, they used to blame cancer on stress, ulcers, you name it.

This is just the same old rigmarole of self serving psycho-shamans elbowing their way to the trough.

Just as you say, everyone has stress. If people get ill they look around for causes and will latch onto anything they think might be the cause and try to tackle it in the hope of getting better, which is a reasonable thing to do. Using self report and interview techniques its very easy for psychs to get the answers they want to prove that people report stress at the time of illness onset, proving they should be paid to do more of the same.

But its a hustle, of course they report stress when they are getting ill. The fact is getting ill makes people more vulnerable to stress, which conditioning experiments have proven in relation to animals. The fact of being ill makes the individual physiologically more sensitive to stress and for humans trying to make it in todays world illness is very disruptive and is itself a stress at a time when they are sensitive to stress, which is a double whammy and that is if you only consider the digestive disruption of typical ME IBS bowel symptoms and other somatic symptoms.

In ME many people also get problems with their nervous system i.e. "cognitive dysfunction" making their brains go haywire due to some kind of inflammation and the late Dr Paul Cheney identified that as causing hypersensitivity due to upregulation of nerve activity which is why some PWME get sensitive to light and noise etc. Which in turn is going to make them even more sensitive to stress, as the volume control on sensitivity is dialled up to maximum, so that is a triple whammy of stress magnification for people coming down with ME.

When ME causes that much stress to say stress causes ME based on a self reporting questionnaire about stress at onset is experimental numbskullery of the first order and the results are not worth the pixels they are printed with.

What really concerns me about this is MEAction's MEPedia wiki page not getting it, muddling up cause and effect and advising the public that stress is considered a causal factor when nothing of the sort has been shown by anyone. That is a step backwards into the twilight zone and I am wondering who is responsible for that, whether it is sabotage or noobiness because that is straight out of the BPS playbook and IMHO way out of line.

Its still there.

https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Stress

 

[Sly Saint]

I am wondering who is responsible for that

https://me-pedia.org/index.php?title=Stress&action=history

 

[Sean]

The fact of being ill makes the individual physiologically more sensitive to stress and for humans trying to make it in todays world illness is very disruptive and is itself a stress at a time when they are sensitive to stress, which is a double whammy and that is if you only consider the digestive disruption of typical ME IBS bowel symptoms and other somatic symptoms.

If you load up a car beyond its designed carrying capacity, it is not going to perform well or last long. Doesn't mean the design or construction of the car is at fault.

Same for ME patients. If the ME places an excess burden on patients past their normal healthy capacity, then any additional stressors, even small ones, are going to be difficult to handle.

 

[boolybooly]

https://me-pedia.org/index.php?title=Stress&action=history

Well I am probably being paranoid but even among PWME ideas like this can be insidious memes and we need to be very careful about this kind of assumption.

I just want to reiterate, its a broadly applicable experimental principle that, association between phenomena is not sufficient to show causation.

This idea as promulgated in the MEPedia, that an alleged association between experiencing stress and the time of ME onset means stress causes ME, is fallacious and unscientific, certainly the way that it has been investigated thus far. It is at least as feasible that ME causes a greater experience of stress.

 

[c37]

"More than half of Britons suffering from long Covid might not actually have it
Normal bouts of fever, headache, muscle ache and fatigue experienced by people might be mistaken for long Covid, says study"

Hard to dismiss Long Covid so why not reduce the number who have it?
Having the symptoms of Long Covid does not mean you have it!
Next step refer them to Psychological Therapy?
Or am I being paranoid?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...suffering-long-covid-might-not-actually-have/ (PAYWALL)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58584558

 

[mango]

Hanne Kjöller is back with another (paywalled) editorial on cultural illnesses, in the Swedish paper DN

ME/CFS is mentioned, but the main focus is resignation syndrome ('sleeping beauty' illness, apathetic asylum-seeking children, sometimes lumped togeher with pervasive refusal syndrome) and long covid.

Master suppression techniques by doctors and researches makes doctors and researchers silent

[...] The few who tried to broaden the picture early in the epidemic were silenced. And then it remained silent. As is usually the case with cultural diseases. One might even say that the harsh tone is a symptom in itself that this is indeed a cultural disease. Another is the name dispute that usually ensues.

No one is fighting for the cold, winter stomach flu and seasonal flu to be called anything other than the cold, winter stomach flu and seasonal flu. But when it comes to cultural diseases, there are people who stubbornly fight for a longer and more international-sounding term. Preferably containing "syndromes" added with a fairly long abbreviation of a letter which, to outsiders, obscures more than it explains. Stomach flu or chronic fatigue syndrome is more understandable than ME-CFS, for example. [...]

The public debate is now monotonous. The voices that initially warned against the exoticisation and medicalisation of a well-known post-infectious condition have been absent. GPs who advocated a biopsychosocial approach are publicly humiliated. A professor of kidney medicine writes on Twitter that the Swedish Society of General Medicine is "driving the spread of ignorance, anti-science and misinformation." This is despite the fact that this specialist group probably has the most experience of any new disease with roughly the same symptom bank. [...]

No one denies that infected people can suffer from persistent symptoms. But the fact that the non-hospitalised group would have a harder time recovering than the ventilator-treated group must surely be seen as a medical mystery of the same kind as that medically healthy children were declared terminally ill.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, here's the Wikipedia page on master suppression techniques, also called domination techniques. ("Hersketeknikker" in Norwegian, "härskartekniker" in Swedish.)

 

[rvallee]

Manufacturing consent machine goes brrrrr...

Posting tweet because it contains a few screenshots. From the people who brought you, courtesy of Simon Wessely himself: "actually, 9/11-related 'health problems' are just mass hysteria".

I'm not sure how the idea of "we are healthier than ever" fits in with the idea that there is a "normal background of disabling weeks-long illness happening at any time without any reason whatsoever".

 

[rvallee]

Hanne Kjöller is back with another (paywalled) editorial on cultural illnesses, in the Swedish paper DN

ME/CFS is mentioned, but the main focus is resignation syndrome ('sleeping beauty' illness, apathetic asylum-seeking children, sometimes lumped togeher with pervasive refusal syndrome) and long covid.


For those unfamiliar with the concept, here's the Wikipedia page on master suppression techniques, also called domination techniques. ("Hersketeknikker" in Norwegian, "härskartekniker" in Swedish.)

Somehow, she is actually arguing that she didn't write what she actually did just write. Orwell was really way out there in the bushes thinking it would be necessary to rewrite the past, the authors of an op-ed explicitly arguing something can literally deny the very thing they just wrote and published in the last several hours.

This time I did not even write ME is a cultural disease. Nor did I write that stomach flu is. The sentence you are referring to was about easy-to-understand or incomprehensible diagnostic names.

 

[Mithriel]

It shows ignorance to include ME in the list of cultural names. The doctors who described it used the protocols of the time to describe the symptoms using the latin and greek norms, myalgia meaning muscle pain, encephalo for involving the brain and myelitis for involving the nerves.

They were also influenced by the fact they considered it caused by an enterovirus and related to polio, so myalgic encephalomyeltis instead of polio myelitis.

The CFS and ME/CFS were given to us by the BPS being defended in the article. So the cultural name meant to be a sign the patients are taking control was given to us by the people now saying it is a sign it is not a proper disease. How circular can you get?

ME was also considered as middle class hypochondria, remember yuppy flu? Or a prominent BPSer sharing that a pilot from Eastern Europe said his country was too poor to have ME and everyone having a good chortle

 

[rvallee]

Neuroscientist who very likely had never heard the term brain fog until last year and would have scoffed at a patient describing it, though with the same answer she offers here, now has a 30-day plan to cure your anxiety and confusion. You can even find out your Hogwart schoolcognitive profile, which is totally a real thing that wasn't made-up entirely.

You know it's legit because it totally describes a very real common scenario that people are familiar with: ask your friends about brain fog and they will totally know what it means and this is totally a real scenario in real life featuring real people who aren't caricatures of human behavior.

 

[Joan Crawford]

Plenty of people live highly stressful lives and don't develop LongCovid (example certain prime ministers and presidents). Plenty of people live low stress lives and still develop LongCovid or other post-viral conditions. Men like this Fossli Jensen simply don't care about epidemiological evidence when it conflicts with their preconceived ideas.

Totally - you summed it up well

 

[Mithriel]

Neuroscientist who very likely had never heard the term brain fog until last year and would have scoffed at a patient describing it, though with the same answer she offers here, now has a 30-day plan to cure your anxiety and confusion. You can even find out your Hogwart schoolcognitive profile, which is totally a real thing that wasn't made-up entirely.

You know it's legit because it totally describes a very real common scenario that people are familiar with: ask your friends about brain fog and they will totally know what it means and this is totally a real scenario in real life featuring real people who aren't caricatures of human behavior.

Brain fog is giving a name to something everyone experiences. It is another example of the way ME symptoms (and now longcovid) are trivialised to mean common everyday occurrences so everyone knows what it means and thinks we are complaining about something everyone else puts up with. So we are just anxious and here is the cure.

My "brain fog" consisted of not being able to remember how to get home from the local park and playing a game with my 3 year old of "where do we go now?" It was being stuck in the car until my father in law opened the door for me because I couldn't remember how to get out. The awful day I was sitting an exam and couldn't remember how to write.

We have the usual "Why did I come into this room?" and "What was his name again?" but it is a lot more than that.

 

[Keela Too]

@Mithriel - Your experiences of brain fog are pretty rough.

Mine tend to be more like I’m viewing the whole world through a very small keyhole, I can “get there” and find the answer I need, but it takes so much longer because I can only concentrate on that one very small part of reality at a time. For you, it sounds like some-one has gone and stuck chewing-gum in your keyhole view.

Apologies if that sounds like I’m making light of the issue, I’m not really. . . Just trying to find the right words.

 

[Mithriel]

Now in my 60s, I reassure myself I don't have Alzheimer's because the same things were happening in my 20s

Sometimes my hands wont' work sometimes my brain won't work, it all feels like the same sort of block.

 

[rvallee]

Mayo Clinic has received a large NIH grant to study Long Covid. Of course this is standard but that's basically the point: the standard is a disaster, this kind of form is completely useless at giving information.

I just hope that the strong reactions on social media may influence things a bit, because left to their own devices they will obviously screw up it as usual.