ixchelkali
Senior Member
- Messages
- 1,107
- Location
- Long Beach, CA
PSYCHIATRIST! DANGER Will Robinson DANGER.
Sigh why does their always have to be a psychiatric aspect to our Condition. I've had some sort of health issue or another since I was about 20. And my Fatigue from Hell started nearly Five years ago Friday December 16, 2006.
I have no doubt there's a neuropsychiatric aspect to ME/CFS. In fact, those are some of the most disabling symptoms I have: brain fog, poor short-term memory, difficulty learning new things, difficulty finding words, poor spatial perception, trouble with multitasking, slow processing of information, poor reading comprehension, trouble doing arithmetic in my head, hyperacute sense of smell, etc. etc. Most of our ME/CFS experts have said for some time that there is dysregulation of the HPA axis; the thalamus is in the brain. Personally, I suspect that if it proves to be an autoimmune disease, the affected cells will include the hypothalamus, simply because the processes that the hypothalamus regulates all seem to be messed up in ME/CFS patients.
Diseases with a neuropsychiatric component include Huntington's disease, Sydenham's chorea, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's. Actually, I don't know if it's possible for ME/CFS to be an encephalopathy without being a neuropsychiatric disease.
I fully understand why the word "psychiatric" can be a red flag for ME/CFS patients. It's been used against us too much. Plus, most people, including those in the medical profession, equate anything with the word psychiatric with mental illness, so there's a danger that it will reinforce their erroneous stereotypes about ME/CFS patients. But I think that if we overreact to the word, we feed into the garbage that Mr Wessely and his cronies keep repeating about us, that we will attack anyone who suggests that ME/CFS has a psychiatric component. You and I know that they are intentionally muddying the waters, and that they AREN'T talking about neuropsychiatric elements, they're talking about psychosomatic illness. But Dr. Hornig was careful to say that's NOT what she means. I believe she's using the term in its correct medical sense, not in the Wessely/White doublespeak sense.