Dimensional Personality Assessment among a CFS sample with Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5), 2018, Calvo et al.

Since they evaluated patients who already had CFS, I don't think they can tell whether their findings represent a potential predisposition or are rather a consequence of the disease. To see if PD's were a predisposition, they'd need to do a prospective study of a group of otherwise healthy people with personality disorders and see if they go on to develop CFS in greater numbers than healthy controls without personality disorder. That's not such an easy study to pull off when the odds of getting CFS are probably less than 1 in 250. It seems like you'd have to recruit an enormous number of people to get statistically significant results.

Alternatively, I suppose you could check for prior PD's in brand new cases of CFS, but that also seems like a dubious prospect, given that the average time from onset to diagnosis is reportedly five years - more than enough time to develop PD suggestive symptoms as the consequence of dealing with a terrible illness.

As has been mentioned, it's pretty easy to see most of these self-reported "PD" symptoms as a result of the extreme limitations imposed by the disease and its chronic nature. For example, making sure that certain items are always in the same place could simply be a strategy to deal with an impaired memory, or, as @Mithriel and @Esther12 said, an energy saving tactic.

The only one of these PD symptoms that I find hard to see as a possible effect of the impact of the illness itself is "perseveration" - i.e. constantly repeating a word, phrase or gesture for no reason - and even that "PD" is said to be "usually caused by brain injury or other organic disorder."

 

Oh, I used to be a hardcore perfectionist. Not anymore! ME cured me of that pretty fast.

 

Perfectionism as in expecting research to be conducted according to the highest scientific standards?

I can see why they wouldn't like that.

 

To paraphrase Time Bandits: "Oh, Psychology... Dear Psychology, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of perfectionism."

 

I think perseveration would be diagnosed as such:
“Every time I eat <insert activity>, my <symptom/s> start...”
“Now that is not possible, let’s talk about your distant/non-existent/forgotten childhood trauma...”
“No, my <symptom/s> start when I <insert activity>”.
Done.

 

I'm curious as to why there is not a distinction made between doing/not doing something because the person cannot, or because the person doesn't want to.

 

Yes, it would be interesting to see the results if the patients had been told to answer the questions as they would have in the year before they got ME.

 

But, @Luther Blissett I heard from a very wise muppet that "there is no try".

 

Yes, I always thought it was a shame that Yoda didn't have a Jedi - English dictionary with the word "try" in it.

 

Looking at the scales used ....this study suffers from the usual lack of scientific rigour you see with these pop psychology papers...sounds more like horoscopes than science the way I read it.

 

By a strange coincidence I have found an early reference to Type A personality and perfectionism in Goldberg:

"Another possible vulnerability factor is the" type A" personality, since individuals who score high on the quality are ambitious individuals who set high standards for themselves, and we may expect that they will therefore be especially sensitive to a disorder which in effect prevents then (sic) from attaining these standards. McMurray and others have found that Type A individuals are poor at coping with inactivity. They experience higher levels of self reported distress and show high levels of autonomic arousal. We have found that chronic fatigue sufferers have an excess of Type A traits (22), and this might explain their intolerance of fatigue, and the tendency of some patients with PVFS to develop depressive symptoms in the aftermath of their acute illness-and since their self-esteem is often tied up with the high standards which they set themselves at work. We also found, as might have been expected, that they had scores on illness behaviour scales characterised bydisease conviction, denial and somatic focusing."

22 Woods TO, Goldberg DP, Roberts T. Vulnerability to chronic fatigue syndrome. (Submitted to J Psychosomatic Research)

Psychiatric perspectives: an overview TO Woods, DP Goldberg British Medical Bulletin (1991) vol 47 no 4 pp908-918.

It is ironic that my attention was drawn to him by his reference in this paper to the "ME Society". That seems to be the sort of error which one does not make if one has read the document containing the information to which one is referring. Goldberg was potentially an influential figure. we can be sure he was in contact with Wessely in 1989, as there is a paper by SW in a book edited by Goldberg in that year. This was about the time that the psychiatric aspects of ME were being removed from hysteria and reassigned to anxiety and depression. Coincidentally that was a major area of interest to Goldberg.

 

I'm pretty sure that the real problem is that such individuals set high standards for Mr Goldberg, so he's just getting the boot in first.

 

For me, this isn't
"I’ve been told that I spend too much time making sure things are exactly in place.
People tell me that I focus too much on minor details."
But I understand it could be interpreted like this.

How much time do you spend on accomodating because of ME? It can take a while, agreed. But once you have adjusted, do you still think about it if everything is in place or hussle around to put everything in place? Is adjusting due to disability perfectionism? Is adjusting perfectionism? I guess not, given that there is a "psychiatric disorder" called "adjustment disorder".

For us, these adjustments are not minor. It's about our health. Others could call that "minor", which I feel to be an offence.

This is the problem with these questionnaires. They are interpreted differently by different persons.

 

I see what you're saying. Part of the thing is that it asks about the judgements of other people, and other people are most likely to be aware of my sleeping arrangements on the rare nights when I'm sleeping somewhere unusual, and then I normally do have to make some effort to get light properly shut out. I don't need to make any effort in my own room, but no-one will be aware of that.

 

Yes, it's about what others say...What a strange thing. Why should I care about what others say about me? (With the exception of a few important people, like beloved ones, very good friends, etc.) This one will say that, that one will say this. People like me, othets don't. What unhappiness if I focused on what others say.
(I hope this is not misunderstood.)

That's maybe why I didn't read the "I'm told that" part.

Also, how can others judge why I'm doing this or that? How can they judge that what I do is not "normal", considering my situation? What gives them the right to judge?

Now that you point to it I realize how problematic the questions are. They are devaluating. They encourage conformism and in a way self-denialism. (I am like this or that but since others tell me that's not "normal" I'll hide it.)

 

I guess that it's to avoid the problem of perfectionist people thinking 'I spend just the right amount of time getting things obsessively perfect'.

To me it seems really difficult to come up with good questionnaires for this sort of thing - or at least, ones that will not lead to distorted results for those living in unusual circumstances.

 

Such things always remind me of Woody Allen's "Everything works", where the protagonist always sings "Happy Birthday to you" while washing his hands, which comes over as a mix of "perfectionism and compulsion". The young girl who's seeing him doing this asks him why, and he has a "logic" explanation which the girl simply accepts as correct.

The unusual thing is that everyone just accepts his - and the others' roles' - "weirdness". For me, this movie is like an appeal of tolerance.

I don't understand this dire need for conformism which these questions mirror to me. I don't think we need these questionnaires.