State of Mind: Is Long COVID Linked to Mental Illness?

mariovitali said:
I have no doubt that mental disorders are closely related to ME/CFS and possibly LongCOVID. However, I do not believe that it is all in our mind. The perspective of what we think about "mental" disorders changes drastically if we would consider that that these disorders may be attributed to specific metabolic, mitochondrial and redox problems.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30585734/
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I would be happy for a neuropsychiatrist who was interested in PHYSIOLOGY of the brain to be interested in ME.
 
I skimmed the article. If she is a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford why didn’t she interview M Monje and M James both of whom work on brain/neuro LC/MECFS issues at Stanford—In addition to the other usual suspects like R Davis, M Davis and M Snyder?

Honestly a lot of these so-called journalists get their expert sources from Twitter, which is a big red flag and a crappy journalism practice.
 
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Grace Huckins on the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) site:


"I am a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford University, and I am also pursuing a minor in philosophy. I am fascinated by the ways in which science tries to understand and explain the world—and, in particular, the social implications of those processes. Currently, I am studying what happens when scientists bring together machine learning and brain scans in an attempt to uncover the biological roots of mental illness. Before coming to Stanford, I completed master's degrees in neuroscience and gender studies at Oxford, where I focused on the neuroscientific study of gender identity. In my writing, I want help marginalized groups engage with the scientific and technological endeavors that profoundly affect them but too rarely seek their input. I am absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to work at WIRED this summer and to be a part of this year's AAAS MMF cohort."

https://www.aaas.org/programs/mass-media-fellowship/grace-huckins




For goodness sake, the back-to-front-ness of Grace's claims on the AAAS site, contrasted with what she wrote in her Slate LC article, plus her dismissive attitude to the ME and LC patients who are more informed about ME and LC research than she is - it's doing my head in. The more I read her tweets on the subject of her article the more patronising she sounds. It would appear that ME and LC patients are the wrong kind of 'marginalised group', the unworthy ones - or not marginalised at all in Grace's limited and narrow view.


Slate have sidestepped all the criticisms of the article by simply tweeting it again, and again.
 
Tuesday evening 27th June





Grace on 'terrified' patients. Still patronising, still pontificating. Oblivious of the political dimensions of ME (and now LC) research, what's funded and what's not funded, who gains and who loses..







Groan - she *still* thinks she knows best - and should have the right to insert herself and her beliefs into the issue of what LC research funding should be spent on.






And has the arrogance to pronounce on what (in her fantasies) has harmed us.
 
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Lou B Lou said:
Tuesday evening 27th June




Grace on 'terrified' patients. Still patronising, still pontificating. Oblivious of the political dimensions of ME (and now LC) research, what's funded and what's not funded, who gains and who loses..







Groan - she *still* thinks she knows best - and should have the right to insert herself and her beliefs into the issue of what LC research funding should be spent on.






And has the arrogance to pronounce on what (in her fantasies) has harmed us.
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paternalism that’s what. And she should have encountered that term as part of her gender studies unless something went very wrong with her studies so I don’t know why she is engaging in being a paternalist cliche.
 
Lou B Lou said:
Tuesday evening 27th June





Grace on 'terrified' patients. Still patronising, still pontificating. Oblivious of the political dimensions of ME (and now LC) research, what's funded and what's not funded, who gains and who loses..







Groan - she *still* thinks she knows best - and should have the right to insert herself and her beliefs into the issue of what LC research funding should be spent on.






And has the arrogance to pronounce on what (in her fantasies) has harmed us.
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This is what the block button is for. It's a nice button with a very nice function. I use it often nowadays.

Edit: and this is why I block people like that
FzunYGrWIAA2ea9
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good thread


We have zero FDA-approved treatment for #LongCovid. Nothing has been developed, everything is used off label. Talking about CBT and exercise for Long Covid is like talking about CBT and exercise for treatment of post-Covid diabetes before insulin was invented. 2/n
An overzealous group of physicians eager to jump on the "psychological" train and offer a biased opinion, often with little scientific evidence, & an equally overzealous group of journalists eager to make a name for themselves: a recipe for false narrative and zero facts.
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3/n

"Psychological" narrative is highly attractive: it seeks no biomarkers or targeted therapies. It shifts the blame and responsibility to get better on the patient. It resurrects centuries-old falsehoods of the mind controlling your health. It squashes the scientific inquiry. 4/n

"Psychological" narrative is highly cost-effective: it suits the insurance companies, private sector and politics. "Pandemic is over" becomes even more convincing when Long Covid is turned into nothing more than a psychological issue one can conquer through CBT and exercise. 5/n

The truth is a lot scarier than the narrative so "we" collectively try to avoid it, sprinkle with some positivity and a lot of false narrative. #LongCovid is a disease process that has nothing to do with psychology, your attitude, your diet, or how much you exercise. 6/n

It'll take a long time to understand #LongCovid and even longer to come up with new therapies. Until then, it's up to us to do what we can to fight misinformation and false narratives and to protect ourselves the best we can from getting reinfected. End 7/7
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If I wrote a piece about some ethnic group, and a band of cretinous bigots were praising it, I would stop and think twice about what I’ve just contributed to. She seems to believe that anyone interpreting her work in such a fashion, hasn’t actually read it. Moreover, she thinks patients who contest this paradigm are either too emotional or ignorant to view the problem rationally.

I hope someone writes a counterpoint to this. These manifestos are exhausting, and they appear inescapable.

P.S. Gaffney isn’t an expert!!!
 
It's 3.40 in the morning and I'm tired/wired pissed off with this whole business. Twitter is dire as a medium for any real communication. The author of this article says she's listening and learning while her responses say otherwise. Then there are the side conversations like one just now where someone gets the wrong end of the stick and I foolishly join in and get called vile for accidentally referring to a woman as he, and @dave30th is called a misogynist. I hate Twitter.
 
Another person with nothing new to offer inserting herself into a conversation that has been going on since before she was born.

The issue here is that no matter how many caveats and disclaimers they put in academic papers about “association” and “risk factors”, the midwit clinicians who actually treat the patient will say studies have proven that LC is depression/anxiety. Tuller put it succinctly:

https://twitter.com/davidtuller1/status/1674019187855962114
 
That's a great thread from Dr Blitshteyn. Recording —

Reading the articles in the mainstream media on #LongCovid and mental health got me thinking: when did mental health become the basis of a disease process? Mental health is important in health and disease, but is not a substitution for scientific advancement.

We have zero FDA-approved treatment for #LongCovid. Nothing has been developed, everything is used off label. Talking about CBT and exercise for Long Covid is like talking about CBT and exercise for treatment of post-Covid diabetes before insulin was invented.

An overzealous group of physicians eager to jump on the "psychological" train and offer a biased opinion, often with little scientific evidence, & an equally overzealous group of journalists eager to make a name for themselves: a recipe for false narrative and zero facts.

"Psychological" narrative is highly attractive: it seeks no biomarkers or targeted therapies. It shifts the blame and responsibility to get better on the patient. It resurrects centuries-old falsehoods of the mind controlling your health. It squashes the scientific inquiry.

"Psychological" narrative is highly cost-affective: it suits the insurance companies, private sector and politics. "Pandemic is over" becomes even more convincing when Long Covid is turned into nothing more than a psychological issue one can conquer through CBT and exercise.

The truth is a lot scarier than the narrative so "we" collectively try to avoid it, sprinkle with some positivity and a lot of false narrative. #LongCovid is a disease process that has nothing to do with psychology, your attitude, your diet, or how much you exercise.

It'll take a long time to understand #LongCovid and even longer to come up with new therapies. Until then, it's up to us to do what we can to fight misinformation and false narratives and to protect ourselves the best we can from getting reinfected.
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Also note the response —

 
She wrote: "Pieces by mainstream journalists have suggested that linking depression and long COVID is tantamount to accusing all long COVID sufferers of being malingerers."

She references articles by David Tuller and Ed Young which do not really say this. They interviewed patients who have been the victim of people who misinterpret studies that link depression/anxiety to Long Covid as proving the condition is psychosomatic (mainly caused by stress or worry) or less severe.

It is a rather unfair mischaracterization of what they wrote.
 
I think her main argument is that there is too much resistance to mental illness having a causal role in Long Covid because this could actually be the case. But she admits that at present there is no strong evidence for this. So when there is strong evidence there will likely be few resistance to it.

In my view, the resistance is mainly against overstatements of the current evidence to which her piece ironically contributes. She constantly suggests that a correlation might mean causation and what this would imply and criticises other who do not jump to the same conclusion.
 
It is unfortunate that mental illness and stress as a cause of symptoms carry so much stigma. This should not happen, but it does. So if journalists write that illness X is likely caused by mental illness/stress while the evidence is very weak, this will likely be harmful for patients with illness X.

The journalists think they can ignore this and that they carry no responsibility in this. They seem to think that the the stigma is incorrect, not their statements. They should be free to speculate and write about this subject.

I'm not so sure it is that easy. When it comes to the causation of a severe and common illness, a topic that will influence a lot of vulnerable people, you have to make sure that you stick closely to the scientific evidence. Otherwise you are creating illness narratives about how sick people should be viewed and treated, without sound evidence to back it up. Even if well intentioned, this has gone wrong so many times in the past with other illnesses.

If journalists were to write in the same vein about other potential causation - say pesticides or a food preservatives - there would likely be lawsuits for the losses that companies had.
 
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