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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Cognitive, Behavioural and Emotional Processing Vulnerability Factors

Messages
29
When I think back to when I was first ill ...I was desperate not to be seen as lazy. I eagerly characterised myself as a hard worker...

I feels so sorry for the poor people having CBT at King's with Chalder and Co, (as I did) desperately trying to make sense of why they feel like absolute s***t. When there IS no sense or explanation....you're just ill.
 

Snowdrop

Rebel without a biscuit
Messages
2,933
All studies like this one suffer IMO from the cart before the horse problem.
Is it not possible that people who appear normal functioning who will later display symptoms of ME might have a sub-clinical ME going on during the time before it becomes clear something is wrong?

I'm thinking while they may look like they function normally, stress of any kind will later be put down to contributing to 'getting ME' where I think it's possible that people start to struggle to carry on functioning like normal due to the illness taking hold and starting to break down our proper functioning perhaps at first on a more subtle level. We carry on and then perceive the struggle as contributing rather than as part of the onset of illness.

Papers like this one seem to me to simply be monstrous attempts to hold onto the narrative of who we are. It can also help them to validate their position around PACE. We set standards ridiculously high so of course we'll 'pick at' perfectly sound science. If we are able to we need to support those scientists (via twitter) and various articles (site traffic etc) who are looking to hold scientists to account -- making the process more rigourous transparent and open.
 

Jonathan Edwards

"Gibberish"
Messages
5,256
I never thought that I would need to say this about a paper from 'scientific colleagues' but this study is pitifully poor, creepy and in my view totally unethical.

Yet again what is salient is that the authors demonstrate I complete lack of understanding and respect for the sorts of emotions that they claim to 'study'. (If they cannot see why I say this, that just proves my point.) They remind me of Jehovah's witnesses, full of kind thoughts for others but happy to teach that children should die rather than have blood transfusions.

If Chalder is this bad, how can one possibly take seriously her collaborations with Wessely or White, or indeed the rest of their output?
 

A.B.

Senior Member
Messages
3,780
Sadly, for these idiots, a complete lack of logical consistency in their BPS model isn't going to occur to them, let alone stop them.

If you read Deary's cognitive behavioural model, it is actually the belief that emotions, thoughts and behaviour are causing "medically unexplained symptoms" and that the job of the therapist is to find out how this occurs in each individual case. In their view there is no contradiction between patient A having CFS because they're a perfectionist workaholic, patient B because they're hypochondriac, patient C because of repressed childhood traumas, patient D because they need an excuse for achieving little in life. Okay, maybe not the last one but still. It is extraordinarily flexible.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/projects/cfs/publications/assets/2007/deary.pdf

One would think that psychologist above all would understand confirmation bias.
 

Snow Leopard

Hibernating
Messages
5,902
Location
South Australia
I thought there was already a well recognised correlation between stress (combined with other factors) and the onset of ME. So what's new?

No.

Stress as some sort of catch-all phrase is nonspecific to the point of meaningness. Who really cares if 30% of patients (retrospectively) report experiencing "stress" in some temporal period before the onset of the illness. What does it mean in terms of treatment? Nothing, because it doesn't lead to better understanding of how the illness develops and perpetuates.

Bio-psycho-social models don't mean that you study the bio, the social and psychological separately and expect to combine it into a single model ad-hoc, it means studying them all simultaneously, finding specific and sensitive markers ("stress" is neither specific or sensitive) and then building a model.

If a correlation is expected to be associated with causation, we must demand high specificity and/or sensitivity for it to be considered a valid predictor - regardless of whether it is a biomarker or psychomarker.
 
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PDXhausted

Senior Member
Messages
258
Location
NW US
It bothers me that journals don't hold themselves to higher standards in publishing this kind of thing. It feels like the "scientific" equivalent of tabloid journalism. How could anyone trained in science think this was worthy of publication? Granted maybe there just isn't enough (any?) high quality psych research so they're forced to just publish anything.

Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy Journal must be the National Enquirer of science. I'm expecting their next publication to be a case study on a 30-lb baby from space startling local residents and causing an outbreak of ME.
 

Wally

Senior Member
Messages
1,167
Did anyone else happen to notice that the 2017 UK study, which is the subject of this thread has now been cited in a 2018 Netherlands study?
See,
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2018.00097/full#B95 - Higher Prevalence of “Low T3 Syndrome” in Patients With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Case-Contol Study
Some features of CFS resemble those of a persistent response to environmental stress known as dauer (hypometabolic state). The cell danger response (CDR) is an evolutionarily conserved metabolic response, activated when a cell encounters a chemical, physical, or microbial threat that could injure or kill the cell (91)....

Psychological trauma, particularly during childhood, can also activate the CDR and produce chronic inflammation (91, 94). It has recently been shown that CFS patients are endowed with different psychological vulnerability factors, notably perfectionism and high moral standards (95). These may render them more susceptible to the psychological stress of current society, with possible effects on the immune system and thyroid axis (56, 62, 79, 80).
(Note - I added the bolding to quoted text above to direct the reader to footnote 95, which is the reference to the paper that is the subject of this thread..)
 

Rufous McKinney

Senior Member
Messages
13,249
we're perfectionists with high moral standards

In my case, sick started as a tiny child; I have done psychology in arrears and determined my mother was very stressed when I was in utero. I have numerous genetic predispositions for deficiencies. Maybe I would have been fine, just hanging out with chickens, gathering some fire wood, collecting bulbs.

But no, I had to : save the world from itself.

My perfectionism and high moral standards got applied quite many years later.

If you are the star of the elementary school play, watch out! If you got the A's. If you paid attention, while the others were asleep, watch out you'll be 'asleep, like Sleeping Beauty' some time thereafter.
 

Wally

Senior Member
Messages
1,167
Some of the same reasearchers who were involved in the 2017 study, which is the subject of this thread, conducted a somewhat similar research study that was published in 2018. This time the group that was being studied was adolescent CFS patients and their parents with a primary focus being the effect on the illness of emotions/beliefs related to “perfectionism”.
See, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2019.1579331?journalCode=gpsh20
Perfectionism and beliefs about emotions in adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome and their parents: a preliminary investigation in a case control study nested within a cohort
. . .
Conclusion: Parental perfectionism and emotion regulation style may contribute to perfectionism in adolescents with CFS. Parental representations could contribute to fatigue maintenance.

[Not sure what this group of researchers may have in store to be published in 2019 and beyond???? But my dog is now an emotional wreck after hearing about these studies. He appears fearful and depressed that as my faithful companion his high moral standards, dogged perfectionism and management style of his emotions, could be found, by these researchers or ones with similar interests, to be perpetuating my CFS illness, especially fatigue. His greatest fear is that such a study could be the impetus for another set of UK driven CFS treatment guidelines 😱 that permanently banish him from my bed and couch where I spend most of my days and nights.. 🛌 🛋🚫🐶.]
 

NelliePledge

Senior Member
Messages
807
they just regurgitate the same old rubbish with words swapped round to freshen it up

catastrophising
avoidance
blah blah blah