Slate recently ran a piece by a young journalist and Stanford neuroscience graduate student, Grace Huckins, about purported links between long Covid and mental illness. I found it problematic. For one thing, in the same sentence it linked to both a story of mine in Codastory.com and one from The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong, and asserted that both of our articles “suggested that linking depression and long COVID is tantamount to accusing all long COVID sufferers of being malingerers.”
This was not remotely the point I was trying to make; I can’t speak for Ed, but I didn’t read his article that way either. My piece was about physicians smacked by long Covid who have been told categorically that depression, anxiety and what-not are the cause of all their devastating symptoms and that absolutely no pathophysiological processes are implicated. I highlighted this point and a couple of others on Twitter and suggested that the journalist and I meet up to discuss the issues, since we’re both in the San Francisco area. (I would have DM’d her if that had been possible on Twitter.)
In response, she offered to DM me. She also indicated that she had been “deeply troubled by some of your writing (I have read quite a lot of it), which in my eyes goes against the scientific evidence.” As of now, I haven’t heard from her, so I remain curious about what I have written that she views as antithetical to the science.
Perhaps this concern involves my clearly negative view of a Dutch study of cognitive behavior therapy for long Covid. My piece included some harsh words about this study, which was still ongoing at the time. The study results were published earlier this year. The Slate piece highlighted the positive reported findings as legitimate evidence for the effectiveness of this sort of intervention. I think the study stinks–not least because the authors have acknowledged after-the-fact that they had null results for their sole objective outcome–activity as measured by actometer worn for a week or two.
In retrospect, I should have made clearer that much of my objection to the study related to its provenance. Professor Hans Knoop, the senior author, is an unreliable narrator when it comes to his own study findings. There are good reasons not to take his work at face value. Just one example is how he and a senior colleague wrote in a 2011 Lancet commentary that PACE participants met a “strict criterion for recovery”—an absurd statement. It was self-evident that the trial was designed in a way that would almost guarantee positive results.
