NHS Persistent Physical Symptoms website (North and West Cumbria)

[TakMak]

I'm not keen on the distinction between psychological and physical. All of it is physical - the brain is a biological organ and it functions by moving chemicals around. That's surely physical. At its simplest, psychological disorders are problems with brain chemistry and function. The problem is that we can't easily see these actions in the brain so we separate illnesses into 'physical' and 'mental'. That's surely not the best way to look at these things.

Cheryl, have you been offered MRI scans of the head and spine at all?

 

[Cheryl M]

One of the psychologists I saw was so determined that everything I was suffering was psychological in origin that she insisted the agitation I felt whenever I combined antidepressants was caused by my parents' divorce.

Me: "And the vomiting, diarrhoea, fever, chills, tremor and delirium?" (These are the symptoms of serotonin syndrome, btw)

Her: (Long silence) "Do you want to talk about your childhood?"

Serotonin syndrome can be fatal. Sometimes it's as if they want us all dead. (Hmm....)

I had a private brain MRI done in 2013. I had not read Osler's Web at that time and didn't realise that Cheney et al only found UBOs when they did the MRIs at a certain frequency. I don't know what settings the machine used, but the scan found nothing (apparently - the company refused to let me see the images).