I added this comment:
"Alex Young aka alex3619 says:
January 22, 2012 at 11:17 pm
This is an excellent article. I have recently drawn some of the same conclusions you have, although I am nearly a year behind you in analyzing it all. There is an important part of the debate missing though: the evidence based medicine movement. It is closely tied into the biopsychosocial movement, and is again an arm of government policy dictating to the medical profession. It has been called Zombie Science.
I am in Australia but have been actively watching this encroach on the UK disabled. It is loathesome what is happening over there. I might be half a world away, and disabled myself, but I cannot be quiet on this issue. The sense of fear and bewilderment I regularly hear from the disabled in the UK is reverberating around the world.
Those of you living in the UK might feel that you are isolated and in this alone, but if you reach out to international activists you may find global support.
This has the potential to completely destroy the good name of the UK, and people are already making unsavoury parallels with despicable regimes.
One of the things that is often missed is there is a growing rise in opposition to the biopsychosocial movement, not from the disabled, but from psychiatrists and other medical professions. I am looking into this."
I would like to add a little additional commentary.
"It is the contention of this article that a prime purpose behind recent use of the BPS is to create an artificial distinction between deserving and undeserving sick, through the social construction of a new category of patient/claimant the illness deviant in order to facilitate the movement of a high percentage of those claiming illness related benefits off welfare, via the aforementioned WCA."
This deserving and undeserving sick argument has been used to describe ME patients - we are the undeserving sick.
"Conscious, no doubt, of the social unacceptability of the suggestion that all sick and disabled people are malingerers, there is then the attempt to construct a softer variant of the illness deviant via psychology. This individual is more by way of being an accidental malingerer, subject to a form of self-deception, in which they harbour irrational beliefs about their condition, and how it affects their functioning or capabilities. This deviant also holds similar mistaken attitudes towards work in that they make false attributions towards it as the source of their illness or potential cause of further suffering, and fail to realise it is the only means by which they can heal. Once these have been posed as the problem and solution, a process in which sufferers are invariably found fit for work can justify a snatching away of the crutches of benefit support through a doublespeak discourse reframing such support as abandonment and redefining this actual form of abandonment as rescue."
I wonder if he has ME in mind, or if this insidious attitude is spreading to other disorders. I am getting the impression it is the latter, which again highlights that we have been trying to fight this on our own, without realizing that many other disabled communities have the same issue.
"Bluesky, I was appalled to discover what they have been doing to the M.E community for so many years. Its nothing short of legitimised abuse. The one discouraging thing Ive experienced in all my research so far has been discovering, for how many years, how much authentic evidence has been simply disregarded by those in power in favour of this spurious psychological approach. Some of the accounts on the net are simply heartbreaking, and it beggars belief that these people should have been allowed to continue with their methods and theories. As someone pointed out recently they intervene in peoples lives with impunity, disregarding their negative effects, for which they are never held to account, and quickly move on to something else (as Wessely did in moving on to Gulf War Syndrome, another topic that evidently held the potential for his psychological quackbuster approach). Professor Wessely should be granted a dictionary of his own, so far has he stretched the meaning of the English language while attempting to explain that ME although a real illness, is often first magined. He has trodden the tightrope of confusing semantics with the balance of Blondel and the focus of a train spotter. Martin J. Walker In Wesselys World were ALL potential hysterics. Excluding himself of course. Though its evident from his over-reaction to legitimate criticism that his particular psychological susceptibility is to a persecution complex. Ironic."
This is the last bastion of obsolete Freudian psychiatry. It should be opposed by medical practitioners and researchers everywhere. The fact that it hasn't is indicative that the medical profession by and large (yes, there are exceptions thankfully) have acquiesed to the wholesale abuse and ostracising of the disabled. I find it interesting that Gil is using the euthanasia by stealth argument that I have used on several occasions. The opinions in this article are very close to my own.
Bye, Alex
