During ME Awareness Week, we revisit the toxic legacy of McEvedy and Beard

[AndyPR]

A paper written by two psychiatrists in 1970 has influenced medical, public and media perceptions of ME as an illness for decades. For ME Awareness Week, SARAH STAPLES argues it’s a story that every patient with ME needs to know – and share.

It would almost be funny if its effects hadn’t been so tragic. And after all, who would believe it? A disease defined by a flawed 40-year-old study – where no patients were interviewed and which concluded that ME was mass hysteria because many of those affected were women.

But that’s ME. And it’s not funny. Because ask anyone – male or female – who has it and they’ll tell you their own horror story of the day a doctor told them to go home, take an aspirin and rest. Or the time a taxi driver taking them to college ‘joked’ it was only a short walk and they were lazy.

Both these stories, incidentally, are true – and recent. And both, perhaps, can trace their origins in part to that same research paper – and the misconceptions that spread from it down the years like Chinese whispers. So let’s begin our history of ME on January 3, 1970.

It’s not a date that will stand out of the history books. The next day, The Beatles will record their last session, giving it some kudos. But Jan 3 passes largely unnoticed. But it’s on this day that The British Medical Journal prints a paper called Royal Free Epidemic of 1955: A Reconsideration.

http://www.meassociation.org.uk/201...oxic-legacy-of-mcevedy-and-beard-10-may-2017/

 

[Chrisb]

In this context the contribution made by Professor P K Thomas of the Royal Free should be given due credit. In his presentation to the junior minister Nicholas Scott and assorted civil servants on 2.11.93 he is minuted as saying:

"There can be no doubt that this epidemic (the Royal Free) represented mass conversion hysteria. The epidemic was triggered by a small number of cases of genuine neurological disorder."

This was a crucial time in the forming of the official view of the illness.

Wessely gave a much more measured presentation which included "There is no evidence of hysterical or feigned origin to symptoms."

Credit where it is due.

 

[AndyPR]

Wessely gave a much more measured presentation which included "There is no evidence of hysterical or feigned origin to symptoms."

But that has been his line all along, as I understand it. His theory is the origin is biological, the continuation of the symptoms though is not.

 

[Forbin]

The January 1970 paper, "Royal Free Epidemic of 1955: A Reconsideration," by McEvedy and Beard can be seen here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1700894/pdf/brmedj02268-0019.pdf

A companion piece by the same authors in the same issue , "Concept of Bengn Myalgic Encephalomyeletis," can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1700895/pdf/brmedj02268-0023.pdf

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Three years later, the two also wrote another paper published in the February 1973 edition of The British Journal of Psychiatry. It was titled: "A controlled follow-up of cases involved in an epidemic of 'benign myalgic encephalomyelitis."

This paper appears to have compared, via questionnaires, 100 victims at Royal Free Hospital with 100 workers there in 1955 who did not fall ill. The survey took place about 15 years after the outbreak.

So far, I have only been able to find the first page of this study: http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/122/567/141


[I sometimes find it a bit confusing when people mention "Beard" in relation to ME/CFS, because George Miller Beard was the American neurologist who popularized the notion of "neurasthenia" in the late 1800's.]

 

[TiredSam]

@charles shepherd quote:

“People who wanted to do research in this area were often dissuaded from doing it because they were told ME wasn’t a physical illness, it was psychological. That mud stuck for a long, long time.”

That's very interesting. The psychs have been saying for years that it's ME militants who dissuade researchers entering the field. Pot, kettle, black.

 

[slysaint]

Watched an interesting documentary on Sigmund Freud on BBC 4; http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07ht3cd

So many similarities to SW..........uncanny.