I thought it was interesting how he singled out the way a biomedical approach is always short circuited in terms of credibility. It reminds me of the way NICE appointed twenty odd proponents of CBT to the guideline draft group and then claimed "balance" because they'd put two ( count 'em!) patient reps in, who of course had exactly the same status and authority.
Another thing I come back to in terms of abuse is thinking about 19th century literature. The trope of the sickly housewife complaining of her "nerves" and being a comic figure of ridicule was a stock component of the era (I'm thinking of books by Willie Collins and Jane Austen for starters). This "whining hypochondriac" stereotype, all the better if it's a woman, has deep roots in our culture and has never really been challenged. The likes of Gez Blair only go to show how hollow the claim of "support" really is for us amongst the medical community.
And another thing (yawn). Blair saying "you can't say anything about ME and psychiatry" has a distinct the ring of the old "you can't talk about immigration" chestnut in the UK media. It's an odd business that, restricted as this line apparently is, no one ever seems to stop going on about the supposed psychiatric element of ME and no one gets taken seriously if they talk about anything else. Probably all those death threats, I'd imagine.