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New BPS 'breakthrough' paper : childhood sexual harassment predicts ME severity

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msf

Senior Member
Messages
3,650
Alternative conclusion: relative tolerance of BPS ideas predicts how out-of-touch someone is with reality.

These people are the dumbest of the dumb. If they were a smart (but amoral) BPser like Wessely, they would have got a few years ago.
 
M

msf

Senior Member
Messages
3,650
Actually, I guess it kind of makes sense: it seems to me that sexual harassment would predict ME severity more than whether someone accidentally flushed their goldfish down their toilet does. Also, the length of a person´s body hair probably predicts ME severity more than the number of times they have eaten avocados does. Only a complete moron would think that that was significant or worthy of study though.
 
lilpink

lilpink

Senior Member
Messages
988
Location
UK
This is just so grubby. Sadly I think, as homosapien in the 21st century, we are realizing that many children are being abused within and without the home. I imagine some children have the double burden of ME (though appreciate this paper uses the moniker 'CFS' ..whatever that is..) and childhood abuse to bear. How horrendous must that be? But outside the BPS school (ie; from reliable sources) I have yet to hear any correlation being suggested between having ME and being subject to childhood abuse or between having ME and childhood abuse making the experience of ME worse. Simple logic would compute that childhood abuse is likely to render all other negative childhood experiences in a worse light? But using childhood abuse as a hook on which to hang a new theory which can extend the careers and the hegemony of the BPS school is cruel and unusual in the extreme. To use the suffering of children as a 'tactic' (I'm inclined to believe this is happening here in the absence of good evidence to the contrary) is deplorable. What does it say about children who are being abused? That they can be used as a device and as such their collective & individual suffering is incidental?
 
Forbin

Forbin

Senior Member
Messages
966
Well, I see they've started to rearrange the deck chairs. The paradigm shift must be near.

deck-chairs-on-Titanic-copy.jpg
 
Hutan

Hutan

Senior Member
Messages
1,099
Location
New Zealand
Solstice said:
I do remember my leg being humped by my nephew's dog one time. Could Bello really be the cause of my M.E.?
Click to expand...

No, @Solstice. Having your leg humped is sexual abuse - and that seems to be no problem at all.

What you do need to search your memory for are occasions where Bello:
  • wolf-whistled you,
  • leered at you in a suggestive manner,
  • asked to hump your leg.
If you can recall any of those, you should be very afraid.
 
L

Londinium

Senior Member
Messages
178
Jeez, this takes me back to a conversation I had with a GP when I first got ill. A long interrogation into my childhood along the lines of 'are you sure you're not mentally ill?'. Had I had a happy childhood? Had I been abused? Were my parents divorced? Had I had any bad relationship break ups? Et cetera et cetara ad nauseum

After ten minutes of that I realised that actually I lived a pretty charmed life thus far. And that such a fishing exercise would for many people find something. I have many friends who if they'd faced the same questioning would have had to 'confess' to some form of childhood trauma - which would then be leapt upon as the 'real reason' for their disease.
 
Mrs Sowester

Mrs Sowester

Senior Member
Messages
1,055
Well, sex certainly does effect my symptom severity in that I have at least a week long crash after every time these days, but I'm in my mid forties!

Unless Matthew T showing me his willy in the back of the school library when we were 11 counts as harassment I was never abused. But I do remember giggling a lot, so it's possible I may have damaged his developing psyche enough to give him ME...
 
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markielock

Senior Member
Messages
319
All I can say is *sigh*. I'm sure this happens in other areas of scientific inquiry, but why is the CFS/ME space so prevalent with bad science? It's an established, although still fairly mysterious, condition with enough good research out there to completely reject the sheer metric tonnes of bollocks thrown out about it.
 
R

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
trishrhymes said:
First, this seems to be a classic case of p hacking. Carry out lots of statistical tests on a pile of data. Look for any that happen to fall just below the magic p = 0.05 level, and attribute meaning to what is probably a chance variation.
Click to expand...

I was questioning somewhat if they'd done enough tests for this to be the case.
However.
The TEC is a 30-item self-report questionaire on 29 types of potential trauma
Click to expand...

I do not see any indications that the study pre-registered the ten!!! potential outcomes that they present in table 2 (emotional neglect,emotional abuse, bodily threat total, sexual harrassment, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, emotional abuse, bodily threat total, sexual harassment, sexual abuse), meaning they could have picked any cherry from the list.

Literally https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/significant.png

It also 'amuses' me that child sexual abuse does not cause a significant effect, when harassment does.
I wonder if you properly analyse all scores, if you find anything that is 'protective' towards worsened ME, by the same measures.
(they do not present enough data to do this)

A comedically bad paper.
 
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