Bruce McEwen, who found stress can alter the brain, has died

You could have hormetic effects from psychological stressors as well.

They really are identical on a certain level.

Amazing how conversations swing from one side of extreme to another in just two comments.

What's next, are you going to suggest basilar skull fractures are somewhat linked to emotional stress?

The responses you'd get would likely be due to PTSD induced by interacting with the very rational and scientifically-minded profit-maximizing medical industry, and/or incompetent physicians unable to provide an effective relief for the underlying condition.

Try out this some time: try to reduce stigma around various disorders instead of suggesting running nonconsensual unethical experiments, bordering on sociopathy, on those suffering from difficult to treat disorders.

I totally agree. I was once in the camp that believed mental disorders/traumas could never manifest themselves in real, significant, physical ways. Currently, I work in juvenile dependency law (which I bring up often in comments... as it shapes my world view... a lot) where I represent our State Child Welfare Department when they intervene/work with families when parents are struggling to appropriately parent. We often work with children that have been sexually/physically/emotionally abused. These children will go in to foster care and their parents will engaged in services to address their lack of parenting skills. The parents will also, generally, have limited visitation with their children. Often, again, these children have severe issues: encopresis, extreme weight gain/loss, lack of social skills, lashing out at peers and adults for no reason, hyper-sexualized behaviors, etc... While in foster care, these behaviors often decrease significantly. Then, out of the blue, after one visit with a parent, the children see all of their issues re-arise and they completely decompensate for days or weeks or months. It is horrific to watch.

The point being, I imagine this same thing happens with adults. And I think we, as a society, do a horrible job realizing how deep trauma can run and how it can manifest itself. For children everyone accepts it as normal, but for adults the perspecitive seems to be exactly as you state it is. And this is just wrong.

If that makes sense.

This is a growing area of research now, on how trauma and emotional stress affect mental health. For anyone interested in this topic, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a good resources. I also like the madinamerica website, which offers articles written by mental health practitioners who are critical of the chemical imbalance model of the brain (which was pushed by pharmaceutical companies https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-psyc...).

Almost every disease can be linked to emotional stress or trauma. When people have a high ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Score) Score, their risk of almost every adult illness goes up a lot. That's because childhood trauma causes epigenetic changes that affect inflammation, immune function, etc.

A heart attack can be triggered by stress. But you don't go up to someone who's had a heart attack and say, "Just relax -- it's just stress." Stress may have been the spark but once the fire is lit it burns all on its own. Similarly with a lot of bodily ailments, once a system is compromised then "relaxing" might not be enough to fix it.

As someone with CFS, what we don't like is when people imply or just say that it's "not real," "not that bad," "all in our heads," etc. Often laypersons become armchair diagnosticians, tell you that you're 'stressed,' and then assume that knowledge will fix the problem. But, just like the patient who's had a heart attack, the problem is a lot bigger now, and the interventions required are a lot more difficult than "just relax."

> but there is an entire field ( psychology ) predicated on the mind and brain duality.

No, psychology isn't predicated on mind/body duality. Much of it is arguably compatible with mind/body duality simply because it doesn't address physical root causes but only higher-level phenomena, but going beyond that to say that it is predicated on mind/body duality is like saying that Computer Science, because it deals with abstract computation and mostly not the underlying physical mechanisms (left to the separate field of computer engineering) is predicated on computation/processor duality.

Psychology is no more predicated on mind-brain duality than computer science is predicated on hardware-algorithm duality. It's a level of analysis issue. There's plenty of psychology close to the neuron, and there's plenty of psychology where invoking neural substrates is unnecessary or even impossible.

Are you suggesting physicians are uncomfortable treating somatization disorders or something?

Your comment makes a lot of assumptions: 1) physician is qualified and competent. 2) diagnosis is correct. 3) treatment is optimal.

Those are all big assumptions. Misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment are very, very common. "Placebo" prescriptions are common. Something like 25% of presentations at primary care are for medically unexplained symptoms.

However, any half-decent physician will attempt to address obvious psychopathology, if present. I don't believe it is commonly being ignored.

I don't know your case specifics, but in presence of objective abnormalities - there is obviously going to be hesitation to diagnose somatoform.

> Patients are left to figure this out for themselves, and usually don’t as the idea is considered so wacky.

In my case it's not just the idea per se, it's also how people tend to talk about it. When I look for stuff about "trauma healing", I mostly get three things:

1) Seriously questionable marketing copy (e.g. [1]).

2) (Discussion of) narratives of childhood abuse, almost always with at least one identified individual abuser, and usually recognizing their experiences as abuse only in retrospect.

3) Recommendations for $IMPORTANT_BOOK about $THEORY by $VISIONARY_INVENTOR_OF_THE_THEORY (which invariably leads back to #1; see also Scott Alexander's "all therapy books" review [2])

So I'm not surprised that this isn't clearly established as a treatment modality among medical professionals. There seems to be a good chance that something real is there, but I don't see anything convincing in terms of a validated theory or proven method of treatment. I honestly get the impression of something vaguely cult-like about some of the exchanges on social media around this (idiosyncratic uses of jargon, revelation of hidden truths as a major theme, claims of suppression by the mainstream/establishment), which I think has put me off trying to learn more about it because the whole thing starts to seem a little shady (cf. chiropractic, homeopathy, faith healing, etc.). Do you have any recommendations for someone who's had this kind of experience with the idea?

[1] The Foundation For Human Enrichment, d.b.a. Somatic Experiencing® Trauma Institute, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to resolving trauma worldwide by providing state-of-the-art professional training and public education in Somatic Experiencing® (SE™)

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therap...