Hip
Senior Member
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How so??????
The ME/CFS community had a bad experience with the Wessely school psychiatrists, who put forward the idea that ME/CFS was an "all in the mind" psychosomatic condition. They said that your belief that you are ill is what keeps you ill. This led to a situation where many doctors became dismissive of ME/CFS, and worse still, offered inappropriate psychological interventions.
As a result of this bad experience with the Wessely school, now whenever any psychological research is done on ME/CFS, ME/CFS patients may assume the worst, and think the research is deliberately trying to portray ME/CFS as "all in the mind".
That's might be thought of as catastrophizing, ie, interpreting something as much worse than it is.
To an extent I can understand this stance that some ME/CFS patients take: if you have had a very bad experience with a certain group of people like the Wessely school psychiatrists, naturally you may become wary of any psychiatrists / psychologists, and suspicious of their motives.
However, I do think there is often a sort of knee jerk reaction against any psychological perspective taken on ME/CFS. As soon as the "psy" word is seen, people assume it's a ruse to cast ME/CFS in a psychosomatic light.
So for example, I don't think the pain catastrophizing research is aiming to make doctors dismissive of pain, as far as I am aware.
But this is not to say that ME/CFS patients should stop fighting against ME/CFS being labeled as a somatoform, psychosomatic or psychogenic; I very much support this continued fight.
Although I should add the proviso that in some cases of ME/CFS, there may be a psychological element such as a learned stress response which may be helping to maintain the disease. ME/CFS is a multifaceted disease which seems to have many causal inputs.
So what I am saying is that I support this fight against ME/CFS being generally labeled as a psychogenic condition, but remain open minded about the possibility that in some minority patients, a psychogenic causal factor may play a role in their disease.
When my CFS symptoms are bad my anxiety is high
Have you seen my thread: Completely eliminated my severe anxiety symptoms with three supplements!
A lot of people with significant anxiety disorder symptoms have found these supplement very effective at reducing or eliminating their anxiety, especially the N-acetyl-glucosamine supplement.
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