What I meant was: why is there a need to add the concept of "mind" into the equation whereas we are already talking about the brain?
When we feel say anxiety or depression, we feel that in our mind, so you have to include mind in psycho–neuro–immunology. If you take away mind, you take away all the subjective mental symptoms we feel and can describe to others.
Of course, the anxiety or depression may well be caused by dysfunctions in the brain, and this is exactly the sort of thing that psychoneuroimmunology studies.
Excluding mind from the equation was actually the basis of a disastrous approach to psychology called
Behaviorism. The Behaviorist approach has been very much maligned.
Still, according to your link, fever is not a behavior. Which was the point raised above.
Sickness behavior is a theory stating that the way we feel and act (our behavior) when we are sick is deliberately put their by nature in order for us to withdraw from our community and spend time recovering. In others words, nature makes us deliberately behave in this way, for our own good. This is no different to nature making us behave in a certain way when we see an attractive person of the opposite sex (mating behavior). Withdrawing from the community may also be a good strategy to avoid spreading the pathogens during the fever period, when you are the most contagious, so it makes sense for us to have evolved such a behavior — it helps community survival.
I think there may be something to this sickness behavior theory, although I suspect that many of the mental symptoms we feel (and behaviors we adopt) during fever and sickness are just accidental or coincidental.
Interesting, yes. New, certainly not.
Do you know anyone else who has published a theory that ME/CFS is due to vagus nerve infection?
I actually wrote thread that hypothesized that many ME/CFS symptom might be due to autoantibodies attacking the parasympathetic nervous system (the vagus forms the main part of the parasympathetic nervous system). That thread is here:
Could autoantibodies to muscarinic acetylcholine receptors underpin ME/CFS?
This is along the same lines as the vagus infection theory (that is, both speculate that an impediment to the vagus/parasympathetic nerves may underpins ME/CFS symptoms).
I do not think psychologists are the best equipped to research this disease (ie. they are out of their depth). In a world with VERY limited resources dedicated to this illness, I'd like better to see biochemists, neurologists and immunologists get the funds, rather than psychologists even with the best intentions in the world.
It is certainly a debatable point, but the academic world these days has become far more interdisciplinary, with more and more academics either crossing the boundaries of two or more disciplines themselves, in terms of their own knowledge base, or at least closely working with others from surrounding disciplines. It is increasingly recognized that many new discoveries and advances actually occur at the boundaries of disciplines, and this is why the interdisciplinary approach often yields results.
There is no reason why a talented researcher could not master both psychology as well as neurology and immunology. Freud himself was originally a neurologist, and then only later switched to (or rather invented) psychoanalysis.
I very much support the field of psychology taking a greater interest in neurology and immunology: in effect, it means psychologists are becoming more interested in the idea that mental symptom may have
physical causes.
If you look at the history of psychology, for too long they have been working under the
psychogenic paradigm, which assumes that mental symptoms have psychological causes. For example, if you have anxiety, then the psychogenic paradigm might say this comes from the way your mother or father treated you as an infant, or something along those lines. Freud was full of theories like that.
It is high time for a shift away from that psychogenic paradigm, and I think psychologists are indeed now realizing that many mental symptoms — especially in
abnormal psychology — are due to physiological dysfunction of the body and brain, rather than psychological in origin. I think the psychogenic paradigm is more applicable to normal psychology, and works well there; but looking for
physiological dysfunctions as causes of mental symptoms is more appropriate in abnormal psychology.
So once psychologists start to look at the mental and cognitive symptom of ME/CFS in terms of manifestations of an underlying
physiological dysfunction, they are going to make progress.