Pretty much. Patients buy into this too, unfortunately. We have an irrational, excessive fear of addiction, as individuals and as a society, so the society creates laws and policies that make it harder and harder to get pain treated properly.
We also have a fear of "dependency" that often extends to any drug. Just as the expectation is pushed on us that our chronic illness should be "temporary" and if it isn't, we're somehow refusing to get well...we push the expectation on ourselves that any medication we take for symptom relief should also be "temporary," not something we might need to take indefinitely...and it's somehow our fault if we're not clever enough to fix the problem some other way.
Yes, I agree, especially with your second paragraph and also WillowJ's point about how ME/CFS is not taken to be a serious chronic illness that requires a serious chronic treatment. After all, it wasn't that long ago that medical textbooks were saying 50% of patients would recover within 6 months to 2 years -- based on very shaky evidence. That's what my old textbook says.
For an analogy, albeit imperfect, let's look at blood pressure and diabetes treatment. In both conditions, people require treatment for long periods of time, daily, with medications. Sometimes, the doses of those medicines need to be increased and other times, more than one medication is needed. [In fact, the stats are now that more than 50% of people will need more than 1 med to get blood pressure under control.] Off of those meds, many people will have "rebound" high blood pressure and high blood sugars that are bad for them. The meds have potential side effects also like any med. However, these conditions are viewed as primarily biological and not necessarily controllable 100% by the patient's thoughts or actions; some people just have bad "protoplasm" (medical slang, don't take it literally!) and have bad disease regardless of how much they try to control their diet and increase activity for these conditions. Most good docs do not place blame on their patients if they require more treatment for their disease. The language of dependence, addiction, tolerance, etc. is not applied to these conditions.
As WillowJ alluded to, not treating pain and sleep does have long-term consequences that science does not yet fully understand. It is known in my field (and I'm not in pain management even) that undertreated pain can lead to delirium in the elderly but that fact is underrecognized by non-specialists. In terms of dosage, in regards to opioids, neither clinicians experienced with pain nor the World Health Organization has a set dosage that is deemed "dangerously high." It is acknowledged that people have widely varying degrees of pain and reactions to pain and that a "high dosage" for one person may be a "low dosage" for another and inadequate for relief of pain. (The good thing for opioids is that they don't have a peak level beyond which people don't respond.) Rather dosage needs to be tailored individually taking into account side effects, patient preferences, physician experience, etc. etc. If a patient chooses to have inadequately treated pain because they have ideas about dependence/ addiction that are not supported by the scientific literature after they've been educated by their physician, that is fine but it should be an individual choice and not healthcare policy.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about pain management, even among nurses, pharmacists, and physicians, so finding an authoritative resource is important. In fact, there is so much misinformation that my state took the very rare initiative of requiring all physicians (save pathologists, etc.) to take a course on pain treatment or not have their license renewed.
[ A quick google site that might be good:
http://www.theacpa.org/default.aspx]
I am somewhat passionate about this topic because I had a patient with sickle cell disease (a painful condition) whom many of my professors viewed as a drug seeker. I was taught to deny him "too high" a dose of opiods; it wasn't until a new professor showed up and advancements came about in the treatment of this illness that I learned what a difference a different attitude and treatment regimen made.