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

Keith Geraghty is correct: “…one sees clearly how bad such science is - you can’t propose (that) beliefs perpetuate CFS, then find they don’t, but ignore your main finding…..”
https://twitter.com/user/status/1102245254282051586


How much longer will journals continue to publish the flawed BPS brigade research which advocates for a psychogenic cause of complex diseases, whilst ignoring the evidence which proves them wrong?

Time is finally running out for them, so it might behove them to heed what the Czech-born but nationalised French writer Milan Kundera says:
“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favour, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth”.

Is their behaviour the manifestation of very limited minds?

(posted on behalf of Margaret Williams)
4th March 2019

 

Ideological dogma is usually self-sustaining: being right proves it just as much as being wrong.

Nothing that they do makes sense from a rational scientific perspective. Everything does when you consider they are purely ideologically driven, indifferent and incapable of finding fault in their rigid dogma.

You can see it clearly with PACE: it's both the most significant and definitive research on ME but also not a big deal, just one piece of evidence and just as good as other tiny trials with the same flaws. There is a simple definition to describing a fictitious depiction of reality and insisting it is the only true interpretation: delusion.

 

I wonder if they admitted to being unable to find evidence of perfectionism in the parents would they just conclude the perfectionism must lie within the grandparents, or perhaps the aunts and uncles, or maybe their friends, or someone their friends knew, or perhaps the bloke from the local chip shop.

 

It's that second-hand perfectionism that will get ya. It just floats out there in the myasmia, follows you along with all the pre-scientific psychoarglebargle about beliefs and emotionally-generated symptoms.

 

I was going to post a question along the lines of 'do they research perfectionism in cancer patients?'.....
apparently they do:
"
The relationship of perfectionism with psychological symptoms in cancer patients and the contributing role of hyperarousability and coping"

(no idea what that means)

And how did they conduct this research(?)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2016.1273354?src=recsys&journalCode=gpsh20

http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2016.1273354

And how exactly does any of this help someone with cancer?

@Brian Hughes

 

Is all this perfectionism and Type A personality stuff going to survive the queries raised by Pelosi about tobacco funding and the research of Eysenk and his collaborator? I know nothing about this, but rudimentary searches suggest that these concepts were all built upon tobacco based research in the 1960's to provide evidence that the link between smoking and coronary heart disease was correlative and not causative.

So it seems strange to see this research from 2012, which appears to coincide with the release of the documents providing evidence for the link.

 

I think these "researchers" suffer from ethical-basic intelligence-and obsession with finding fault disorder, a perfectionism pathological and menacing.

 

In another article, perfectionism (studied for 50 years!) is associated with anxiety, depression and self-doubt. In other words, it's a close synonym to STRESS.
The article https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10615806.2017.1384466?src=recsys

 

Well maybe if Medicare for All is adopted here in the US, we'll have to shuck out this psych-fraud research funding. I do love the idea of exposing the waste of money given to this type of research. Hmmm....how to approach that?

 

It seems pretty clear that not having dealt with it has allowed the problem to continue putrefying. We're basically going through Refrigerator Mothers: Part Deux with the perfectionist crap from Chalder and the psychosomatic model of ME is barely any different than the various psychosomatic models of peptic ulcers. Those are the exact same mistakes, the only change is the victims.

I think it would be worth highlighting the similarities, that the same problems still infect research today. Some aspects of medicine have basically operated without accountability and are still creating problems, failing the exact same way they failed before but medical institutions apparently refused to learn anything from it.

I just don't know to whom it should be highlighted to.

 

Different illnesses are not in competition but there are comparisons we can make in the way they are treated by the medical profession. With AIDS it was accepted that prejudice against the people most likely to have it impacted treatment measures.

Asthma is a dreadful disease and it is a constant worry to parents but they are not routinely taken to children's court with the risk of the children being taken into care. They do not have to watch them get worse with a treatment but be unable to complain or stop it. Also there exist treatments for asthma so you do not have to feel completely helpless.

We just want equity of treatment. It is this sort of research that makes it harder for us to get.

 

Yes, I understand what you are saying and yes it's usually true. However there's a minority of children for whom the treatments just aren't effective enough. My child was one of those so I can't fully agree with you on this point.

I agree that asthma families don't face the risk or (for some) reality of child protection procedures as ME families do. I also agree about the need for equity of treatment and the problem of research like this.

Personally I just wouldn't compare the two experiences at all. I think asthma as a comparison was a poor choice because it's such a different condition, before you even get into treatments and the wider contexts that parents contend with. It's so very different. I don't see any usefulness in this study.

 

Just to add, my son had brittle asthma. I couldn't remember the name but found it online. He had it from 6 months for the best part of 2 decades but improved slowly in his teens. People who don't know about it might be interested to look it up. It's a severe form of asthma and a more serious thing to live with than the more common asthma cases for which treatments are effective.


This comment may well be off topic. I posted it because this kind of experience of asthma really isn't as well known or understood, even medical knowledge is lacking, and awareness has got to be helpful.



(Incidentally while glancing through info earlier I picked up that there are some BPSer psychologists who hold psychosocial theories about brittle asthma. I don't want to look into it but apparently there they are.)