Covid-19 - Psychological research and treatment

There's no denying it - lockdown is hard.

We're not getting to socialise, we're trapped inside all day and nobody knows when it's going to end.

On the flip side, it can be good to think about the benefits this time has brought.

We're all making more effort to speak to friends and family, we've got more time to try out new things and we're able to evaluate what we really want from life.

We spoke to Dr John Read, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, to get his professional opinion on what lockdown might be doing to Londoners' mental health.
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"I think being scared at the moment is normal, people grieving is normal, to be worrying about things is normal.

"It's dangerous to pathologise [treat as psychologically abnormal] understandable human responses. These are social problems not mental health problems, but what we fear is we are going to see an increase in prescribed medication - such as in the US where there's been a 30 per cent increase - that is a worry.

"We don't want to have people in five years struggling to get off medications."
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https://www.mylondon.news/news/health/london-psychologist-says-its-normal-18183904
 
I think I have just stumbled upon the most insanely delusional piece of pseudoscientific psychobabble nonsense. This is a cancer on science. Absolute lunacy. I am frankly very divided on whether this is satirical, you could not satirize the concept of psychosomatics any dumber than this.

Mind, Body, Illness: Amidst Pandemic, Opportunities for Discovery

https://www.psychologicalscience.or...s-amidst-pandemic-opportunities-for-discovery

In early March, as I raced home from abroad to shelter in place with my family, I asked myself a question: Are respiratory diseases, such as the common cold, physical illnesses or psychological illnesses? If you think this is a silly question, think again. When scientists place a cold virus directly into the noses of healthy adults, only about one-third develop respiratory infections. So a cold must have other causal factors. And some of them may be psychological.
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Here’s what I mean. A virus does not “replicate itself” from its genes within a passive human body. Its capacity to cause infection requires certain necessary conditions in that body’s cells, immune system, and brain. The ensemble of “brain+body” provides a necessary environment for a virus. It contributes to the likelihood of its own infection, not only by the state of its immune and endocrine systems, but also by the mental phenomena it creates, which in turn are linked to immune and metabolic function. Therefore, the probability and severity of infection at any moment, as well as resilience (exposure to a virus with no symptoms), is a unique confluence of a virus in a body with a thinking, feeling, and perceiving brain. Both virus and “brain+body” are mutually dependent causes; therefore, neither should be ignored in science or in practice.
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This is the president of the Association for Psychological Science. President. Not the insane ramblings of a lunatic on a street corner. President. Whew.

 
I can think of a simple experiment that might settle the matter.

Remove the brain, but keep the body 'alive' using whatever they use to do that.

It doesn't have to be the whole brain, just the bit that this president of psychologists uses to 'think' with.

Then expose whats left to viruses, and see if they do what viruses do.

I'd bet a fiver they would.
 
I have just now saved this hilarious/tragic piece for posterity on internet archive.

The one comment below the article opines that putting forward a psychological framework for illness as the article does far overstates psychological roles in biologic illness and does a disservice to psychology. He is not wrong.
 
rvallee said:
I think I have just stumbled upon the most insanely delusional piece of pseudoscientific psychobabble nonsense. This is a cancer on science. Absolute lunacy. I am frankly very divided on whether this is satirical, you could not satirize the concept of psychosomatics any dumber than this.

Mind, Body, Illness: Amidst Pandemic, Opportunities for Discovery

https://www.psychologicalscience.or...s-amidst-pandemic-opportunities-for-discovery




This is the president of the Association for Psychological Science. President. Not the insane ramblings of a lunatic on a street corner. President. Whew.

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That's a shame. I've just listened to her audio book on the "construction of emotions" and liked it.

But it seems to her illness is constructed, too :(

I can't follow her logic in that article at all.
 
rvallee said:
I think I have just stumbled upon the most insanely delusional piece of pseudoscientific psychobabble nonsense. This is a cancer on science. Absolute lunacy. I am frankly very divided on whether this is satirical, you could not satirize the concept of psychosomatics any dumber than this.

Mind, Body, Illness: Amidst Pandemic, Opportunities for Discovery

https://www.psychologicalscience.or...s-amidst-pandemic-opportunities-for-discovery




This is the president of the Association for Psychological Science. President. Not the insane ramblings of a lunatic on a street corner. President. Whew.

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See - the psychosomatic nutters aren’t all on this side of the pond.
 
They drop virus into tissue culture all the time and it manages to replicate.

Also viruses have been around for, what is it, billions of years? Yet consciousness and thoughts only for a few million and only in one species. Plants get infected by viruses and bacteria, as do fish, frogs, fungi and even bacteria have viruses. Cholera is only deadly when it is infected with a virus.

To quote CS Lewis "What do they teach these people?" :banghead::banghead::banghead:
 
oh goody..........

chalder,-trudie.xab0bfd7e.jpg

Trudie Chalder
Professor Trudie Chalder is researching into what we can we learn from acceptance and commitment therapy in relation to COVID-19.

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/mental-health-research
 
article in Telegraph (requires subscription to view full article):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/mind/suffering-bad-case-lockdown-brain-fog/
Whatever you want to call it, rest assured you are not alone in experiencing a major case of pandemic brain fog. The good news is, experts say it is a perfectly normal response to this strange new existence.

Professor Trudie Chalder, who specialises in cognitive behavioural psychotherapy at King’s College London, says lockdown has provided the perfect breeding ground for this kind of fatigue. “We know that fatigue is multifactorial,” she says. “There is never going to be just one thing that contributes to fatigue, but there are a few things that are dead certs.

“One is distress. It could just be everyday anxiety that a lot of people are having now - not just the worries about getting the virus but money fears, being able to pay the bills, whether or not you’re still going to have a job when we come out of this, what’s going to happen to the economy.”

The Office for National Statistics said last week that its regular update on wellbeing showed the number of people over 16 reporting “deep levels of concern and stress” had more than doubled since late 2019. Meanwhile, more than 25 million people were affected by high levels of anxiety in late March as the decision to put the UK into lockdown triggered fears about health, job security and making ends meet among half the adult population.

Anxiety coupled with this sudden change in lifestyle is proving a toxic combination for many, and the loss of a daily routine could be, Professor Chalder says, another major trigger for fatigue. “We know routines are really important. Having a lack of routine can be very tricky and it will upset the body clock. The body clock is really key to helping us feel more normal in these abnormal situations.”


'There is never going to be just one thing that contributes to fatigue, but there are a few things that are dead certs' Credit: Ghislain & Marie David de Lossy

Exercise is also “vital”, as is getting regular fresh air. Getting out for a jog is all very well, but if you are mainly sedentary before and after, then your body (and, therefore, your brain) is only being energised for a tiny chunk of the day. “You need to every hour or so get up and move around,” says Professor Chalder. “Do some stretching. Do something other than just sit there, because that will make you very fatigued, and that’ll make it harder to get going.”
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the loss of a daily routine could be, Professor Chalder says, another major trigger for fatigue. “We know routines are really important.
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Yes, we can see how important routine is to Trudge Chalder. She and her pals have been following the same routine at work for years and years with only the most minute changes.

Regardless of the patient cohort they've been rerunning the same experiment on different groups of patients and getting the same results. Literally the same results every time to the extent I'm not entirely sure if the patients' condition is the focus of the research, or if they simply placed a bet with each other years ago to see how long the British establishment would let them get away with soaking up a lot of money for achieving naff all.

You would wonder why they even bother actually doing the work anymore, except well... without an original thought or insight in their heads their daily work routine is probably about all they can cling to. Let's face it, they've been doing the same thing over and over for so long it can hardly be onerous.
 
Hopefully some of the doctors suffering from post Covid symptoms will call her out on this insulting nonsense.

The trouble is, I suspect many of them will make the distinction between what they believe about fatigue in PVFS / CFS by saying those conditions may be anxiety induced, but their post covid fatigue is real and physical.
 
Trish said:
Hopefully some of the doctors suffering from post Covid symptoms will call her out on this insulting nonsense.

The trouble is, I suspect many of them will make the distinction between what they believe about fatigue in PVFS / CFS by saying those conditions may be anxiety induced, but their post covid fatigue is real and physical.
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Or many of them will struggle on and hide it as best they can from colleagues. I've heard of consultants who had to quietly go and rest in their cars during the day just to get through. They didn't dare let colleagues find out as it would have destroyed their reputation.

I've heard about people who have struggled on at work, trying to get reasonable adaptations or reduce their hours and faced nasty comments and discrimination. The worst of these seemed to come from people who worked in healthcare.
 
I grant you that routines save energy in normal-ish people. You don't have to think through all the steps of, say, your morning ablutions. Routines seem to enforce identity (which is a floating concept I think).

All well and good, Chalder, stick with the trivial psychology of everyday stuff. Leave the ME/CFS and PVFS to the real professionals (MDs who aren't psychiatrists, at least of them).

She has really brainwashed herself by taking CBT way beyond its natural boundaries, into sci-fi land.

Further ad hominem: she lacks empathy to imagine herself having ME/CFS as a vulnerable human being and believing what sufferers say about their illness. She would never make it as an MD or a nurse.

The medical profession has to be careful when they say: we have no treatments for such and such illness but you can consult a psychologist to help you cope with it better. Referring a patient to psychology does not mean that every aspect of the psychology's bathwater is to be used to drown the patient.

First do no harm.

Psychology without a base of empathy is evil.
 
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