The New Yorker, Article: Memoirs of Disease and Disbelief, May 2018

The article mentions, Jen Brea, Julie Rehmeyer and Maya Dusenberry.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/04/memoirs-of-disease-and-disbelief/

 

This is a really brilliant article, I do recommend ppl read the whole thing.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1001594173441626113

 

I think one needs to be careful in framing illnesses within 'social justice' rhetoric. Surely there are fine points to be made but overplaying it will alienate a lot of people.

"Autoimmunity is a feminist issue" = now Republicans hate everything that would help people with autoimmune diseases.
"Autoimmunity causes suffering and prevents people from fully contributing to society, we should invest in finding treatments blah blah" = now it's a win-win. Feminists can still be just as interested, can't they?

With ME/CFS specifically I think it's plain to see that the medical community is equal-opportunity bad with male and female patients. Yes there are more women than men but nobody 'did' that. We all get the same crap. Certainly specific aspects of how it's been dealt with by governments and health systems can be usefully understood through political-economic analysis; it's important to be precise, I think.

What about Gulf War Illness? Male soldiers... just as not-solved as ME/CFS, still labeled as mass hysteria by familiar chumps.

Anyway, I always brought my Mom to appointments I was trying to get something out of. Nobody messes with an indignant mother.

 

The alternative is worse. If you try to appease them then they see it as a weakness they can exploit very successfully, the only things good enough to actually appease them is to adopt their views and vote for their candidates.
They already think the middle class does not deserve healthcare so trying to avoid triggering them is a fools errand.

 

Wow, yes, great review. I was surprised by its thoroughness.

I did wonder what the author meant by this:

I am quite brain dead today so could someone please Dumbsplain if I missed something.

 

The thing is though, women are treated worse then men by healthcare systems. This has been shown clearly.

The other point you mention about it turning certain people off the issue because of using the term feminist etc, well...of course, yes that’s true.

But the whole point is that it can also be used to build allies who do subscribe to those views. And given that women generally get the worse deal, framing it as a feminist issue is more likely to garner support from (healthy) allies. *And* men will benefit from this too.

 

My interpretation was that, as psychs are supposedly the end of the line in diagnosis,they have no one else to dump patients the patients they can't help onto.

If that is the correct interpretation of what was meant, it's hard to know where to start putting them straight.

 

Republicans hate women? Or only those who step out of the kitchen, wearing shoes, while not being pregnant?

 

I interpreted it to mean that psychiatry is the dumping ground for diseases other clinicians don't understand. But many times when the patient 'arrives' at psychiatry, disheartened and beaten down, the psychiatrist will be the one to say, "I don't know what you have, but you don't belong here with me." In parts of the world where ME is not knee-jerk assumed to be a psychiatric problem, this does happen. I've heard more than one story that goes like that.

 

What can happen is that psychiatry will say "We don't know what you have" and "we can't help you". While medical doctors will attribute any reported symptoms to your being a "psych" patient. Patients can get stuck in medical limbo, where neither doctors nor psychiatrists will try to help them or investigate further.