Havana Syndrome: U.S. and Canadian diplomats targeted with possible weapon causing brain injury and neurological symptoms

c37 said:
What if Havana syndrome is all in the mind?
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The full article can be read here if anyone can be bothered reading it.

To be honest, I was expecting the article to be a little more intelligently argued, at least on the surface. Instead, I found it to be poorly written, vapid nonsense. If this is the best that they can do, I wouldn't be worried about their reaction to the NICE guidelines.

He does get bonus points for mentioning Suzanne Sullivan, hysteria, FND and the nocebo effect.
 
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alex3619 said:
The history of psychogenic claims is the history of changing terminology every time they get burned, and they get burned a lot. Patients wake up, doctors wake up, and hey presto, they have new terminology, definitions and claims that look just like the old ones but with a different label.
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Combine the arguments within the articles "What if Havana syndrome is all in the mind?" and
"More than half of Britons suffering from long Covid might not actually have it" and you get the Sharpe/UNUM strategy for dealing with long Covid.

If half the those who claim to have debilitating symptoms from long Covid don't have it they must have FND and all that that entails. Take it a step further and no one is has long Covid until "we’ve ruled out psychogenic causes. " .

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...suffering-long-covid-might-not-actually-have/

 
Art Vandelay said:
Instead, I found it to be poorly written, vapid nonsense.
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Yep, that was obnoxious reading. "Think back to all those friends who thought they had Covid at the start of the pandemic but didn’t." Except as we now know, they probably did. Same with his comments on Gulf War illness.

Will be fascinating to see if "Havana syndrome" is ever openly or otherwise explained. It might be an opposing force's microwave weapon, but if it's predominantly US embassy / security staff that are coming down with this, perhaps it's a side effect of their own sophisticated technology. Would be ironic if it was the result of an anti-snooping or other defensive technology.
 
c37 said:
...If half the those who claim to have debilitating symptoms from long Covid don't have it they must have FND and all that that entails. Take it a step further and no one is has long Covid until "we’ve ruled out psychogenic causes. " .

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...suffering-long-covid-might-not-actually-have/
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There are other diagnoses that might be applied rather than FND: for example, one of the Somatoform disorders (depending on duration of symptoms); Somatic symptom disorder (now available in SNOMED CT), PPS etc.
 
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SNT Gatchaman said:
Yep, that was obnoxious reading. "Think back to all those friends who thought they had Covid at the start of the pandemic but didn’t." Except as we now know, they probably did. Same with his comments on Gulf War illness.
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I find the comments about Gulf War illness highly offensive. I [edit: Think I] remember a transcript of a lecture Wessley gave saying Gulf War illness (syndrome) could be easily explained by service personnel being worried about job losses due to defence cuts.
 
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Art Vandelay said:
The full article can be read here if anyone can be bothered reading it.

To be honest, I was expecting the article to be a little more intelligently argued, at least on the surface. Instead, I found it to be poorly written, vapid nonsense. If this is the best that they can do, I wouldn't be worried about their reaction to the NICE guidelines.

He does get bonus points for mentioning Suzanne Sullivan, hysteria, FND and the nocebo effect.
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It's really dire. It's amazing how many things it gets wrong.

It's very heavy on the 'power of the mind' woo, doesn't understand what placebo and nocebo are and has a very strong smell of dualism.

It does sort of explain why Aaronovitch has been so wrong about ME all these years.

Perhaps he'd recently read this.
https://theconversation.com/havana-...at-doesnt-mean-the-symptoms-arent-real-167275
 
c37 said:
"And it’s a question, in one form or another, that has recurred for me since, nearly 25 years ago, I read a book by the American academic Elaine Showalter called Hystories. Among a series of other outbreaks of moral or physical panic that she analysed, Showalter looked at Gulf War syndrome .... "


".... If we examined the history of what had been described as “hysteria” we might decide that the answer lay not in some outside agency, but in our own incredible minds."

"The symptoms and the suffering of the afflicted, she says, are real. But they are “functional neurological disorders” — the cause lies in our minds. "


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/what-if-havana-syndrome-is-all-in-the-mind-zdhkvphnr
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That is Elaine Showalter who is a historian and sociologist who did not think she needed to talk to any patients before she declared that they were suffering from hysteria caused by the coming millennium and has been strangely silent about the way that ME is just as prevalent in 2021 as 1999?
 
'Hysteria' can mean a lot of different things, but to me some of the theories about secret sonic weapons sound implausible. For some of the symptoms being reported, and the pattern of people, it wouldn't surprise me if within 'Havana Syndrome' we now have people who would have developed fairly common symptoms anyway just having their experiences linked to what some military sources seem to presume is part of an attack on American diplomatic services. Also, if diplomatic staff do feel under attack and threat, some of them may have a level of anxiety about that which could make some of these symptoms worse - that doesn't seem less possible than some of the other theories floating around. There are a lot of people working abroad for the US government and a certain percentage of them are going to suffer from serious new health problems anyway.

Just because we have some of the usual suspects involved and we've seen them making misleading claims elsewhere doesn't mean they're necessarily wrong in this case. It's hard for outsiders to know, and maybe one reason some in the US military are jumping to those assumptions is that they themselves are aware of America covertly developing similar capabilities - though the US military/intelligence services also has a bit of a record of exaggerating the threat posed by their enemies. To me there seems like really good reason to be cautious in assessing any and all claims about this.
 
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c37 said:
We should not look any deeper for the cause "Not until we’ve ruled out psychogenic causes. " .
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My mother-in-law was assumed to be depressed and attention-seeking because nobody could find the cause of her excruciating pain. After she was dismissed she was put on anti-depressants. Three months later she died of ovarian cancer which had metastasized.

If doctors spend lots of time ruling out psychogenic causes of illness and disease before considering looking for biomedical causes it will delay diagnosis of serious life-threatening diseases. And let's face it, psychogenic causes for anything require little or no evidence, so it will stop people getting treated for actual disease.
 
Esther12 said:
'Hysteria' can mean a lot of different things, but to me some of the theories about secret sonic weapons sound implausible. For some of the symptoms being reported, and the pattern of people, it wouldn't surprise me if within 'Havana Syndrome' we now have people who would have developed fairly common symptoms anyway just having their experiences linked to what some military sources seem to presume is part of an attack on American diplomatic services.
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I agree. The most plausible explanation I have seen is that these are people with very usual neurological episodes from things like vestibular neuronitis (very common) and that this is really 'All in the marketing strategy of US intelligence organisations'. Not in the minds of the patients and not due to microwaves.
 
Ariel said:
Can someone explain his connection to this issue? Why has he been making claims about it? I am aware of him but did not know that he had said anything about ME. :( Why?
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He writes an opinion column and when ME was in the news about the harassment claims he wrote about it. He has continued from time to time to refer to the broader subject

Speculation as to why. He has written of how he had a mental health problem and was helped by CBT. That could make him more open to this sort of approach.
 
Arnie Pye said:
My mother-in-law was assumed to be depressed and attention-seeking because nobody could find the cause of her excruciating pain. After she was dismissed she was put on anti-depressants. Three months later she died of ovarian cancer which had metastasized.
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Related: there is a (fortunately increasingly recognised) condition called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, which often presents with major neuropsychiatric symptoms. Typically seen with benign ovarian tumours, such as mature teratomas.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Related: there is a (fortunately increasingly recognised) condition called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, which often presents with major neuropsychiatric symptoms. Typically seen with benign ovarian tumours, such as mature teratomas.
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I'm not quite sure what you are trying to tell me. My mother-in-law was depressed because she was in excruciating pain with ovarian cancer which spread through other parts of her body. She wasn't psychotic or suffering from delusions. And before she became ill she was not depressed. Please don't try and diagnose my late mother-in-law with psychiatric problems that didn't exist.
 
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Arnie Pye said:
I'm not quite sure what you are trying to tell me. My mother-in-law was depressed because she was in excruciating pain with ovarian cancer which spread through other parts of her body. She wasn't psychotic or suffering from delusions. And before she became ill she was not depressed. Please don't try and diagnose my late mother-in-law with psychiatric problems that didn't exist.
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I'm sorry Arnie Pye, it wasn't my intention to suggest anything about your mother-in-law, which is why I prefaced the post with the word "Related" and drew the distinction with it being a benign tumour.

I was referencing a more recently recognised biological condition that was previously thought to be psychogenic, and even demonic possession before that. This condition is most famously described in the book and film Brain on Fire. I thought it would be interesting to the group and relevant to this thread, although quite possibly already well known because of the film.

I will try and be more careful with my comments in future.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
I'm sorry Arnie Pye, it wasn't my intention to suggest anything about your mother-in-law, which is why I prefaced the post with the word "Related" and drew the distinction with it being a benign tumour.
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I'm sorry too, I was being over-sensitive.

I was apparently declared to be a mentally ill drug-seeker during my teens, based on the remarks of an incompetent surgeon, and that diagnosis is still "in force" today. I'm now in my 60s and my quality of life has been determined by the fact I appear to have pissed off a doctor nearly 50 years ago. It's as if I was tried without my knowledge and without being given a chance to defend myself, I was found guilty, and the sentence is life without parole. And I wasn't told about any of these things. I just kept being denied medical care over and over again.
 
JohnTheJack said:
He writes an opinion column and when ME was in the news about the harassment claims he wrote about it. He has continued from time to time to refer to the broader subject

Speculation as to why. He has written of how he had a mental health problem and was helped by CBT. That could make him more open to this sort of approach.
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Some of you who are old enough may recall that Aaronovitz had been part of the University Challenge team where the team members answered "Trotsky" or "Marx" to every question. According to Wikipedia: "Aaronovitch is the son of communist intellectual and economist Sam Aaronovitch,[2] and brother of actor Owen Aaronovitch, and author and screenwriter Ben Aaronovitch. His parents were atheists whose "faith was Marxism", according to Aaronovitch..."

Unknown whether and to what extent he may have connections with the SMC, Sense about Science, Spiked, Institute of Ideas circle.

A few years ago he wrote in the Times about an episode he had experienced while travelling on the tube - a state where he "lost" an hour or so of time. No neurological or other body system problem was found to account for this episode, which was put down to some kind of transient psychological episode. Perhaps this might be colouring his framing of some other conditions - If I can accept I had a psych episode - why can't they? line of thinking.

The publishers of Suzanne O'Sullivan's books must love him - the number of plugs he's given her this last few years.

It's disturbing how some journalists, including Rod Liddle, are given platforms to express personal opinion on medical issues with no medical or scientific background, themselves.
 
There has been a general trend in commentary to refer to psychological studies over the last years (Finkelstein and Syed also come to mind) and how they can be used to explain eg political opinion.

I have also long wondered whether there is something in the background of arts and social science graduates (as these journalists tend to be) to explain behaviour in terms of character (and also perhaps to accept at face value anything, out of a sort of subject-cringe, 'science' and 'scientists' tell them). It is generally seen in culture that anything driven by character is of high value. They spend much of their time in political commentary discussing the character of politicians and voters and using this to explain their behaviour. They may then be more open to such explanations of illness.

Of course, this is all just an attempt to explain a few people's behaviour through their character made by an arts/social science graduate.
 
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