And the article he wrote for The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/inflammation-depression-link-is-not-to-be-sneezed-at-18212
Wait, that sounds familiar...
Hence my concern about specificity.
Boilerplate. As I said last year on the thread about last year's conference, this whole psychoneuroimmunology field is a bit of a cargo cult immunology. People have been studying IFN-alpha / hep C for many years now as a model for sickness behaviour. This stuff has been known since the 1990s. British psychiatry late to the party as usual. It is a totally non-specific thing that's not going to bring you any closer to understanding why one person develops these symptoms in the context of chronic infection or autoimmune disease or depression or ME etc. As you say, it lacks specificity. What bothers me even more than the lack of specificity is this entrenched belief in the field, held with almost delusional conviction, that it is psychological stress driving these immune alterations and so we're back to postulating various ad hoc brain mechanisms and experimenting on patients with psych drugs.
Thank goodness we have Lipkin and Hornig looking at a far more plausible driver of this mess - the gut.