Unhealthy attachments: myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and the commitment to endure - chapter in book on queer commitment

Source: Chapter in Book 'Long term: essays on queer commitment'

Date: June 14,i 2019

URL: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/84301/

Unhealthy attachments: myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and the commitment to endure
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Munt, Sally (2019) Unhealthy attachments: myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and the commitment to endure. In: Herring, Scott and Wallace, Lee (eds.) Long term: essays on queer commitment. Duke University Press, Durham: North Carolina USA. (Accepted)

Sally Munt
- School of Media, Film and Music, Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Sussex

Abstract

This peer reviewed book chapter is an autoethnographic testimony to illness and endurance in queer subjects. It seeks to contribute to queer disability studies, and is a feminist intersectional analysis of how social class, disability, gender, and sexuality may impose on health. It also seeks to explore themes of the longterm, endurance, and resilience.

The chapter contributes to a subgenre of critical writing on ME/CFS.

 

This all sounds SO WEIRD.

 

Professor Sally Munt

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/41291

see also
https://cbttherapist.com/dir/therapist-listings/sally-r-munt/

 

Just picking one at random;

Is 'Religious Conscience' a behavioural problem requiring treatment now then?

I can see it could potentially be a problem when soldiers refuse to shoot people as ordered, due to pesky little irrelevant moral issues, but outside of refusing to kill on command, is it really a behavioural issue requiring it's own treatment approach?

Or are such people deviants? Requiring treatment to bring them into line, as is suggested by the fact that there appears to be a treatment being actively advertised here.

 

It can be in some cases. "Scrupulosity" is the name for the religious form of OCD, and it can be absolutely devastating and debilitating for the sufferer. I know people who have suffered with this.

 

That actually highlights how wilfully wrong they are. Scrupulosity is not encouraged among the religious and is, as you say more likely to be a form of OCD a recognised mental disorder.

A religious conscience is something else altogether and is only a behavioural or mental disorder if you use the words differently from their obvious meaning. This redefining of words to mean whatever they want is a hallmark of BPS thought which they use for their own gain ie talking about "recovery" in the PACE trial press releases which everyone took to mean "healthy and back to work" and then defending their results by saying that they MEANT recovery from this episode which already has the word remission and claiming that everyone has their own idea of what recovery means (when they don't)

The other thing about religious conscience in this list is that is smacks of USSR psychiatry where not believing in the supremacy of communist ideas meant you were mentally ill.

It is a frightening thing.

 

There are some religious cultures that teach very repressive conditioning that is hard to break. It creates a strong sense of guilt that makes it hard to function in normal society. The stories told by those who leave these cultures they are pretty harrowing. It's more about self-blame than learned behavior about others. Especially about sex, oh boy the guilt and ignorance they instill in their members is just mind-bending. As long as it stays within this space it's appropriate. It just isn't clear if that's the case, this is a real slippery slope for people promoting their pet theories without accountability.

Most of the list isn't so bad. We just don't belong there and frankly given the confusion psychology has about us, I don't believe any of the somatoform or hypochondria disorders exist at all, they are merely a misunderstood and misidentified problem and so shouldn't be on that list either. It's important to stick to what's real and evidence-based and this simply isn't.

 

Does this make sense to anyone else? ETA: MeSci did not say that!

Wow! 30 areas of specialization! What an accomplished lady!

I think treatment for becoming involved in one of these religious cultures is usually called deprogramming. I am still uncomfortable with their inclusion of religious conscious as something in need of treatment.

 

https://www.meassociation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/MEA-Petition-Comments-24.07.17-1.pdf

Change.org petition "The NICE guideline for CFS/ME is unfit for purpose and needs a complete revision"

 

It does make sense. It's an academic publication rather than a scientific one, and these are always written in irritatingly abstruse ways, but the fields are so jargon-laden that I guess there often isn't much choice. It's aimed at people who already have a background understanding of the terms and concepts under discussion, and that does have the effect of making it look like gold-plated bollocks to anybody else

She's writing about the ways in which health and health care interacts with all those different areas. E.g. does an uneducated woman who lives in poverty get the same degree of respect from healthcare providers as an educated, wealthy woman would? Possibly not. If you're a lesbian and you live in a place where doctors are homophobic, are you going to be as inclined to go to the doctor as a straight woman would, and what effect might that have on your overall health? What if you have a disability or perhaps a contested illness on top of that? And so on.

There's not enough in the chapter abstract to be able to tell what the author thinks about ME/CFS, specifically, but the fact that it shows up as a thing to be treated with CBT in the list that @Sly Saint posted does make me feel quite suspicious. Given her background I'd hope that the CBT she's using is of the sympathetic kind and not the gaslighting kind that we're used to, but it's impossible to tell without actually reading the book.

"Spirituality" is also listed there as an apparent pathology which gave me a chuckle.

 

Thanks.

 

It most certainly does!

 

Well I understand what she's talking about and where she's coming from if that's what you mean. Intersectionality is a device for exponentially increasing your grievances. Unfortunately it also makes your identity group smaller, so when taken to extremes (which it will be) it leads to ever smaller but more aggrieved groups until every individual is the only member of their own group and legitimately entitled to claim that they are in the most aggrieved person on the planet. At which point someone might twig that multiple aggrieved individuals isn't really what identity politics was supposed to be about, and it will take a French philosopher spouting bollocks (fortunately two-a-penny since the 1970s) to come up with something to solve the paradox. I have colleagues who talk like that. To claim that it makes sense might be a bit of a stretch, but the concept of making sense is anathema to them anyway (Derrida, a two-a-penny French philosopher with a complicated love life, taught them to deride it).

 

Funnily enough that sounds just like psychiatry psychotherapy and CBT. Try deprogramming that lot.

 

I feel like that was directly aimed at me!!!

 

@TiredSam, If you say so.

 

Source: Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment [Book]
Chapter 3, p 41
Date: August 2021
Editors: Scott Herring, Lee Wallace
URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/long-term
https://books.google.com/books?id=ULU2EAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT41
ISBN: Paper: 978-1-4780-1423-2 / Cloth: 978-1-4780-1332-7


Unhealthy attachments: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome and the commitment to endure
----------------------------------------------------------------
Sally R Munt

[Text: See Google books]

 

Intersectionality is sort of what biopsychosocial is supposed to be.

I.e., it might consider someone not as a woman and disabled separately, but as a woman who is also disabled, and how the experiences of both together might be different to being just one or the other.

As was pointed out upthread, though, this is an academic paper, not a scientific one. So it's written in academicese. It's a pet peeve of mine when people could just write in plain English.

Then again, I haven't reread my undergrad papers in over a decade, so maybe they're just as bad? You are marked on whether you use the right lingo, after all, so some people just string all the words together and hope for the best.