The ‘cognitive behavioural model’ of chronic fatigue syndrome: Critique of a flawed model, 2019, Geraghty et al

Wonko said:
The BPS cabal seem to thing that everything, up to and including gravity, can be attributed to mass hysteria.
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Yes and do they never question how mass hysteria can continue for literally decades for many of us?

Or why anyone would choose to be on benefits and to have to live in poverty and go through the repeated hell of benefit reassessment when they could work part time for more with none of the stress or stigma?
 
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chrisb said:
I recently found this is Stephen Strauss's 1988 paper

While already yielding a tantalizing series of observations, future immunologic studies of patients with chronic fatigue need to be undertaken in a more orderly fashion, and patients who are physically deconditioned or clinically depressed should be included as additional control subjects.

The Chronic Mononucleosis Syndrome
Stephen E. Straus
The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 157, Issue 3, March 1988, Pages 405–412, https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/157.3.405

https://sci-hub.se/10.1093/infdis/157.3.405

It seems rather odd that the idea of a deconditioned control group was not taken up and tested before Wessely et al decided in 1989 that deconditioning was a fundamental and treatable part of the illness.
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Depression patients would make a lousy control group. The diagnosis has basically no reliability, I'd be surprised if when we get a reliable test we don't find 50%+ error rates, and they are often heavily-medicated, introducing external effects that comparison groups should avoid. I'm not really sure how effective assessment of deconditioned would be.

There is enormous value in doing comparison studies to falsify the flawed hypotheses that there is anything in common beyond the superficial, but as control groups those populations would be highly problematic. For deconditioning it's really easy, it literally doesn't work like that, people don't suddenly become deconditioned and deconditioning doesn't fluctuate. That should have been done early on and have eliminated this nonsense.

For depression it's already been done to death and there is no correlation at all beyond what we find in similarly disabling diseases, but this hasn't stopped people from saying stupid stuff like CFS is really just the physical symptoms of depression, a random and baseless opinion I have seen far too often expressed by people who seem confused about how little their personal opinion is worth.
 
AllenJB said:
This sounds like the author thinks ME is a type of mass hysteria and that it is perpetuated by online information saying that it is a physical illness perpetuated by viruses. If that were true than CBT should have a very high effectiveness rate. All you should have to do is to convince patients to stop avoiding exercise and they would normalize. Treatment should be very easy. However we know this isn't the case.
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That's mostly what it is. Simon Wessely is a big fan of mass hysteria, sees it everywhere and he is not alone in this. He made the same pronouncements on no less than 4 other patient populations and has a weird obsession with fear playing a major role in ME. No idea where he got this nonsense. He has a history of being wrong but somehow this failure, of wrongly arguing for mass hysteria in dismissing a disease, doesn't count. Never has. Enormous harm, no foul. The exact same mistake keeps being repeated, always with the same confidence that this time it's 100% correct.

The recent renewal of FND is literally just that, FND is conversion disorder with a different label even though they pretend otherwise, but when they talk among themselves they don't feel much restraint in their contempt and derision and that this is 100% what they mean. The recent innovation in that field is to absolutely build a model of mass hysteria while pretending it is not, putting deceit as the method to push it onto patients who don't take kindly to being told nonsense that has nothing to do with their experience and what they report. They seem to think that pissing on people and telling them is raining is serious, professional medicine and that we should be grateful for the lower limb hydration.
 
Daisymay said:
Yes and do they never question how mass hysteria can continue for literally decades for many of us?

Or why anyone would choose to be on benefits and to have to live in poverty and go through the repeated hell of benefit reassessment when they could work part time for more with none of the stress or stigma?
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They have a set list of excuses for that. If you don't like the first one they have another, and then another and so on and on. Always ending with thought-terminating clichés like "you just don't like psychology" or whatever, nevermind that we don't have much opinion on that or that some ME patients are themselves psychologists or psychiatrists. They just don't really care about the substance of what they say, it's 100% style and wholly superficial.

Belief systems are never rational and this here is no exception. It always leads to bizarre things that lack any self-consistency.
 
Just as a side-bar for @AllenJB since you are new here you might not be aware of the History of ME and how it has been subverted by influential people on behalf of powerful interests (namely insurance).

If you are interested (and don't already know) you could have a look here as a starting point.

Welcome to the forum.

ETA: was just on another thread where you remark you've read Osler's web so above comment is superfluous.
 
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"Wessely (1994) and others address patients’ opposition to CBT-GET by suggesting that this is an example of anti-psychiatry sentiment and the stigma of mental health illness. However, Wood and Wessely (1999) found no evidence to support this view in one study."
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Not that it stopped them from continuing ever since to relentlessly claim that their critics are "anti-psychiatry".
 
Sean said:
Not that it stopped them from continuing ever since to relentlessly claim that their critics are "anti-psychiatry".
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Ironically, using brainwash-yourself-better and exercise on a group of people people with some of the most severe functional impairment that can be observed in humans squares pretty well with taking to its logical extreme the fundamental Anti-Psychiatry movement idea that 'mental illness' is a phony construct describing what is in reality a failure of morality or willpower. I think Wesley is more 'Anti-Psychiatry' than patients are '(anti)-(psychiatry)', for whatever that's worth.
 
Tom Kindlon said:
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I've had a little look at the citation literature (via PubMed and Wessely's own archive), and it is quite interesting that Wessely never cites his personality study with Barbara Wood. (Although, having said "never", it does make an appearance in the supplementary material of his review with Huibers on labelling.) I suspect it only exists so that he can claim to have "known it all along" when he is finally found out.
 
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