Mind and Body in the Guardian again

[Woolie]

I just want to chime in and say that the left and liberal academia in humanities really likes ideas of psychosomatic illness and the like. I wrote an essay on trauma in lit when I first had undiagnosed ME and the main secondary sources were all big on Freud and that.

The Guardian also loves to publish this crap. And as someone who used to read a lot of guardian articles I probably absorbed a lot of it from there.

All this no doubt helped my doc convince me my symptoms were psychosomatic.

So this stuff is dangerous because a) it provides a background layer of legiticimacy to BPS arguments in the clinic (oh I read about that in the Guardian...), and b) it reduces our potential pool of allies by bigging up these ideas in the minds of the liberal intelligensia.

I remember in my first year severe I was convinced that the solution to awareness might be to write about this situation to a lefty sociologist/economist (and Guardian columnist) I admired who writes fairly popular books criticising the exact kind of factors that have led to BPS dominance. Then I got to a part in one of his books where he uncritically repeats BPS ideas about pain and expectation to explain why Americans have more chronic pain that Eastern Europeans. It sounds silly now but I was crushed.

This is interesting, @V.R.T. I have noticed an increasing tendency for psychological and neuroscientific evidence to be misappropriated to support some model of society or why we should improve it. It is not that I disagree with the models or recommendations, its that the psyc/neuro evidence has nothing to do with it.

e.g.

• Your symptoms are signs of generational trauma that needs to be righted (may be true, but has nothing to do with your symptoms).
• Your pain/fatigue are the result of rising economic pressures and increasing social injustice (yes, we need to address social injustice, but pain and fatigue, really? Wonder how any humans in the ancient world/middle ages ever functioned at all...)

And even these social interpretations are just thrown out there as a sort of lure to draw you in. When it really comes down to it, the cure is always within the person's control, they just have to change their thoughts, attitudes, biases or behaviours.

 

[Sean]

If you silly lowly patients insist on continuing to be sick, and have a crap life, after we experts have told what is wrong and how to fix it, then it is your fault.

When you abandon methodological rigour and falsification, the world is your oyster!

 

[V.R.T.]

When it really comes down to it, the cure is always within the person's control, they just have to change their thoughts, attitudes, biases or behaviours.

This is the most dangerous lie they tell, at the core of it, and it's one people want desperately to believe, both about themselves and others.

 

[Sean]

This is the most dangerous lie they tell, at the core of it, and it's one people want desperately to believe, both about themselves and others.

Correct. The power of mind over matter is the most potent and seductive myth of them all.