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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> rather than classifying it as "all in the mind" as the PACE trail was seemingly intended.

It's intensely frustrating that ME sufferers dismiss psychiatric illness as "all in the mind". It's hateful, ignorant, stigmatising, and stupid.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is "all in the mind", yet it's listed by world health organisation as one of the ten most debilitating illnesses.

By pushing this "it's not in my head" bullshit ME sufferers make it harder for people to get evidence based treatment.

You're wrong about PACE too. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26521770

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I'm sorry if you took offence at my use of the idiom "all in the mind" - its intended meaning is "imagined" rather than "psychiatric". I am not implying psychiatric illnesses are not real.

Regarding the PACE trail; I was referring to the trail conducted in the UK. About 73% of people with ME do not gain any benefit in symptom relief when CBT is used as a primary intervention.

http://www.meassociation.org.uk/2015/10/press-release-me-ass...

Not a single research believes that CFS is imaginary, even proponents of the cognitive behavioral model of CFS. They say that psychiatric factors influence the illness. Even Wessely himself published a review saying that the immune system was "almost certainly" involved in the etiology of CFS. This "all in your head" accusation is just a strawman.

I think a lot of militant patients incorrectly believe that there is some arbitrary division between mind and body, and that the mind cannot cause physical symptoms (which is, of course, demonstrably false). I think this is caused by a general prejudice against mental illness, as well as a general misunderstanding of how the body works in terms of psychosomatic interactions between mind and body.

"I will argue that ME is simply a belief, the belief that one has an illness called ME..... .I will argue that this line here [overhead slide] represents not the line between low and high cortisol responses [but] the line between real and unreal illness."

Simon Wessely, Microbes, Mental Illness, the Media and ME: The Construction of Disease, 9th Eliot Slater Memorial Lecture, Institute of Psychiatry, April 1994.

Although he may have softened his stance in the past few years, this is fairly representative of Simon Wessely's views during the past 20-25 years.

As I understood it, the similar comment he made in "old bottle, new wine" was referring to the idea that ME is a viral illness when he said that ME is just a belief. He has said in other places that he believes that CFS/ME is a real illness with severe symptoms, as he has done research showing that the immune system is involved.

It could be that he has changed his stance in recent years.

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