If we look past the tragedy, It's quite funny how they are constructing "all in the mind" models describing something that mostly exists in their own minds but not the real world. Their model of CFS involves hysterical irrational patients living in fear of illness and deconditioning themselves. Reality is that patients typically learn to reduce activity levels by first making themselves worse because they underestimate the illness and are taken by surprise by PEM dynamics.
Stories about mysterious psychosomatic illness and cures are constructed from simple methodological errors or flawed logic,ie. the dozens of unblinded studies with subjective endpoints that measure illness perception and therapies that revolve around changing illness perception. It's so absurd you couldn't make this up.
How they consistently fail to consider simple and obvious explanations for an observations merely because it doesn't align with their psychosomatic beliefs, ie. membership of a support group correlating with illness severity is interpreted as support groups making patients sicker (by that logic, we should close all hospitals).
How every thought and action on the part of the patient is interpreted as moral failure and irrationality, ie. the ridiculous idea that seeking treatment and believing to be ill is abnormal.
I'm continually baffled by how this pile of c**** which is the (B)PS model is shafting us all. The bio is ignored mostly in the writings of Wessely, White, Chalder, Wealden etc although the former have dabbled in it and generally we are treated as if we are essentially out of sorts through lack of activity and basically deluded. We aren't treated with the kindness sick people are or with the patience and decency I hope psychiatric patients are, it's a strange mix of not being worthy at all (as in organically physically ill or psychiatric) but instead presented as psychologically deluded, didficult, weak and wilfully physically inactive.
It's easy to totally blame the BPS lot with their poor science and insistence on telling the world that all we need is their GET and CBT but it's not quite that simple. Way back around ten years ago Wessely was saying something like 1/3 of patients we can do nothing for, the FINE trial, with null results
, was published around 2010 and yet MRC still haven't done much of worth for the severe and entrenched. Their refusal to draw in researchers with the lure of guaranteed ring fenced money whilst brazingky blaming patients supposed hostility for the lack of interest in the field goes unchallenged and now we have their giant sticking plaster of MEGA supposed to placate/distract us for the next few years. We need organised patient action against their organised inaction rather than waiting for isolated teams worldwide to find something that forces change.