Psychology & Health: Perfectionism and beliefs about emotions in adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome and their parents (2019) Chalder et al.

Psychology & Health: Perfectionism and beliefs about emotions in adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome and their parents: a preliminary investigation in a case control study nested within a cohort

Maria E. Loades, Katharine A. Rimes, Kate Lievesley, Sheila Ali & Trudie Chalder

Received 18 May 2018, Accepted 07 Dec 2018, Published online: 01 Mar 2019

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08870446.2019.1579331

Objectives: To investigate perfectionism and beliefs about emotions in adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and their parents.

Design: Case-control comparing adolescents (age 11–18) with CFS (N = 121), asthma (N = 27) and healthy controls (N = 78) with a 3-month follow up for CFS participants…

 

ah it's not the children now, it's the parents.........this is going to make the FII accusations situation worse.

eta: they are going to start suggesting CBT for perfectionist parents of sick children next (if they are not already)

 

The parental associations are likely due to participation biases, namely demanding parents are more likely to have children participating in such studies because they want answers. The noteworthy part is the bias applies to the parents, compared to biases of patient participation and response as would be the case in studies of adults.

 

When encouraged to just make stuff up for years, people continue making stuff up until they're stopped. Hell, they're getting participation trophies for doing meaningless research so full throttle on the psychobabble.

This is a parody of science.

 

WTF is emotion regulation style? How does anyone determine what style of emotion regulation one has and how does one measure that style in a scientific way that can have application to medicine? How does one decide what perfectionism is? This is the same fundamental issue as with fatigue: what do you mean by that? How do you remove the subjective framing of what perfectionism mean for one person and make a standard measurement?

How does any of this has any relevance to a disease? This is refrigerator mothers and cancer personalities rolled up all in one. These people have truly lost all attachment with reality, who keeps giving ethical approval and chooses to waste money on this crap? This is money that could be spent on real research! Why are they just burning it away on stupid ideological circlejerks?! Why do they keep doing the same 2 trials over and over again with slight variations?!

 

How fully informed are these parents about the aims of this study? Or parents in any of these types of studies for that matter? If the aim is to find out if they're causing their children's "cfs" why would parents engage in this study?

As long as this disease remains viewed by a significant number of the more powerful as a psychological condition, blame will be assigned to someone for it.

 

Thank you @rvallee, for mentioning the disease causing personality. We are still in the grips of personality types causing diseases.

Early on with ME, I saw a practitioner who angrily told me I have "cfs" due to my type A personality. "All my fault then I'm sick."

 

I’d love to dry up her funding, there would be zero lost. She hasn’t developed anything new since her fatigue buzzy bee covered book.

 

Crazy Trudie and her delusions.

 

Sci Hub, https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08870446.2019.1579331, for those who want to put themselves through the whole paper.

All I could find on selection criteria used

Lots of great stuff like this..

 

Those darned "psychological processes"!

The faulty concept of personality types causing diseases, e.g. type A personality causing "cfs" gives practitioners license to blame and mistreat patients.

I was quite taken aback by the attitude of the practitioner I consulted who said my type A personality had caused my "cfs". This was one of my first encounters with a professional who seemed to think it perfectly fine to be nasty to a paying customer based on some ridiculous theory about personality causing diseases.

 

I come to wonder about the purpose of an abstract. This one provides no useful information and generates nothing but questions that need answering.

I remember more thorough write ups from high school. Why is this considered a write up that belongs in a journal? I can't see the full paper but anyone could literally make stuff up in a matter of hours and submit and nobody would be the wiser.

I doubt the full paper does any justice either. How were the parents assessed apart from a silly questionnaire? Were they seen by the trial authors at all? It's not even clear if both parents were administered the questionnaire separately (not that it would be in any way meaningful if they were).

And you do wonder as Dokagirl says if the parents were told the true nature of the study. I fear too many people are willing to swallow silly answers simply because they are given by an authority and because the people themselves feel out of their depth with whatever is going on.

It's been eye opening being ill like this and being exposed to the truly ludicrous nature of subjective twaddle that passes itself off as psychological understanding.

What a steaming turd.

And as an additional bonus thought-- what if one of the parents is a surgeon or a air traffic controller or any of a number of other jobs that require perfection. Are these jobs to be avoided as people overcome their perfectionism so their kids don't get sick? One could be forgiven for thinking that many psychologists are not just not perfectionist but anti-competent as well.

 

gee, they're really nailing the patient blaming. so not having perfectionism is bad too?

A study of adults with CFS found that perfectionism post-diagnosis was not significantly different from healthy adults but their reports of premorbid perfectionism were significantly higher (Brooks et al., 2017). It is possible that people are forced to modify their perfectionism as a result of disabling CFS symptoms or that they choose to do so. In the present study, socially prescribed perfectionism, including perceived parental criticism and parental expectations, tended to be lower in the CFS group than in healthy controls. It may be that significant others have lowered their expectations in response to the CFS symptoms and impact, or this pattern may have been present premorbidly. Potentially, lower expectations could be an impediment to encouraging the processes that facilitate recovery from CFS, such as gradually and incrementally engaging in activities.

 

Thank you @Snowdrop for your description of psychological understanding: "useless subjective twaddle" - UST.

Heaven help parents with sick kids!

Wonder what kind of parenting psychs do. Maybe sloppy non-perfectionist?

 

I have read this part four times but still don't grasp what is being said here..

Holding unhelpful beliefs about emotions did not differ significantly across groups either, which was also contrary to expectations. This is different to findings in adults with CFS (Rimes et al., 2016; Rimes & Chalder, 2010), with unhelpful beliefs about emotions likely to lead to maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as emotional suppression and somatising. However it has previously been found that adults with CFS report significantly more negative beliefs prior to CFS onset than after diagnosis (Brooks et al., 2017). Developing CFS may mean that an individual has to experience negative emotions from others (e.g. disappointment), which may have previously been avoided. This may lead to modification of their pre-existing beliefs about negative emotions being unacceptable or leading to rejection from others. The current study did not ask adolescents to rate their beliefs about emotions before CFS onset but this could be investigated in future research.

 

The findings of this study also indicate the potential importance of a familybased approach to treatment (Lloyd, Chalder, & Rimes, 2012), given that it is other-oriented perfectionism which seems to be different in CFS, rather than self-oriented perfectionism. Furthermore, involving both mothers and fathers in treatment could be important, as different aspects of maternal perfectionism and beliefs about emotions, but paternal affective style were related to perfectionism in adolescents.

 

Something along the lines of "We've got another idea for yet another really useless study that won't actually help anybody with ME but will keep us in a job"?