Perhaps one the reasons that some ME/CFS patient activists have resorted to making threats of violence against these Wessely School researchers (or anyone else who believes ME/CFS is "all in the mind") is due to the position of powerlessness that many ME/CFS patients find themselves in, as a result of their disease.
It is instructive to read the amusing
history of the HIV activist group ACT UP, who fought so hard in getting a proper research program into AIDS instigated. These guys were certainly not powerless!
These people often got arrested, and got up to all sorts of things, like invading a television studio broadcasting the news and shouting "AIDS is news; fight AIDS, not Arabs!" (this was during the Gulf War); and interrupting a Catholic Mass, chanting slogans and laying down in the aisles. They also organized a "shut down Cosmo" demonstration outside the offices of Cosmopolitan magazine, after the magazine had published an article by a doctor that contained major errors (saying that HIV could not transmit during heterosexual vaginal sex).
All headline grabbing stuff, which ones assumes played a significant role in instigating the multi-billion research investment that has now made AIDS a treatable disease.
But here is the rub: these AIDS activists were fit and able, and so could get involved in these sort of traditional modes of demonstration and campaigning. However ME/CFS patients do not have such recourse, on account of the severe limitations placed upon them by the disease.
So I guess this might explain why some ME/CFS patients resorted to threats of violence: they may have chosen this avenue for no other reason that
this is a feasible thing for an ME/CFS patient to do, whereas the high energy requirements of a demonstration or a march in the streets is just not feasible for many ME/CFS patients.
So what we need to come up with are avenues of action and demonstration that ME/CFS patients are capable of performing, which have also major media impact. The only thing is that I can't think of anything that would fit the bill.