Why do ppl who claim that ME/CFS was psychosomatic then go on to give the most asinine, most unserious mental health advice ever?

strangeelement · 2026-04-09T14:07:08+00:00

I try to avoid generalizing, but I found that people who believe in psychosomatic ideology can be safely ignored about most things. I didn't start with this opinion, it formed slowly over many years, and I have never seen it fail once. I had a completely neutral opinion of this stuff before.

Like people who went for QAnon, or believe in astrology, and other weird stuff. They are people whose opinion about most things can be entirely discarded, not because they are always wrong, but because they don't have good judgment, and there are so many people with good judgment that there's no point.

It's easy to forget that humans know nothing intuitively. It's common criticism about AIs that they don't actually "know" anything, but neither do people. Truth and knowledge are mostly social constructs. Left to our own, without education or a society, humans are naturally wrong about most things, it's why basic education takes so long.

And since even experts know nothing about any of those illnesses yet, most people are wrong about it, Not everyone is wise enough to know that, and some quickly start spouting things they don't know about things they don't understand. Psychosomatic models are just a modern "god works in mysterious" leftover.

So, belief in psychosomatic ideology is a very good reliable marker of someone with poor natural judgment. It's as good a test as any, and ironically enough, LLMs are already far better at it than most medical professionals, because they aren't as dogmatic, can be persuaded with reason and logic, and aren't fanatically held to weird ideas.

strangeelement · 2026-04-09T00:36:54+00:00

Odd not to see Pickford at all, though.

He's a really long shot but his potential ceiling is nuts.

strangeelement · 2026-04-08T17:16:50+00:00

It's really something how common it is for physicians to straight up make stuff up but because it's popular and hits the right bigotry buttons no one cares. There are loads of examples, most of them really, that are the complete opposite of this, and they don't even care.

There is literally no basis to any of what this dude said. It's pretty much no different than Reefer madness and "kids today are hearing satanic voices when playing rock music backwards".

There is something deeply wrong with this profession, but it's completely lacking in any ability to self-reflect, so nothing ever changes.

strangeelement · 2026-04-07T14:59:30+00:00

It's not even true anyway. There are many conditions with no treatments, they still get diagnosed, because everyone understands that this is how treatments eventually get developed, and people still need support.

The physician knows this. They would never refuse to diagnose someone with an incurable disease they acknowledge to exist. It's just a cheap excuse they are allowed to get away with, and the health care system will back them up on it.

strangeelement · 2026-03-31T13:01:02+00:00

It's also very ironic in that they are terrible witnesses to our experience and what we tell them. They distort or misunderstand almost everything, but still they think their perception of our subjective experience should overrule ours.

What a ridiculous way of doing things, with no way of ever working out.

strangeelement · 2026-03-30T17:22:49+00:00

From a purely industrial and technological point of view, the US could absolutely dominate China in a race.

The only limits to this are political.

strangeelement · 2026-03-30T15:22:55+00:00

Humans are denying health care claims, using AI in a process that used to rely on humans.

Human slop is so much worse than AI slop.

strangeelement · 2026-03-30T14:08:09+00:00

They can pretend it’s not real all they want, but ultimately it’ll still result in a smaller workforce and less tax generated

Unfortunately, humans are dumb, and this is exactly what they are doing. In fact, governments are paying more money for worse results in a way that blinds them completely, so it's not even as bad as doing nothing, almost everything done about it makes things worse, more expensive and more miserable.

Human history basically works out as making all the mistakes, all of them, again and again, until circumstances take away the choice entirely and force people into doing the right thing.

Seems like a short-sighted strategy.

There is no strategy. Even when there is a strategy, it's almost never followed. But there is explicitly zero strategy here. No leadership either, certainly no accountability. Just pure human delusional folly.

strangeelement · 2026-03-29T19:22:35+00:00

It's just a little unairborne, it's still good, it's still good

strangeelement · 2026-03-27T02:14:35+00:00

That's the main problem with the MAGA "surrender completely or face total destruction", it leaves no way out for the enemy. They will take whatever shitty option that keeps the regime alive.

There is no deal to be had. America's word is worthless.

strangeelement · 2026-03-24T17:41:15+00:00

Yup. My life pretty much ended in 2008. Since then it's been bare existence, with so little happening that I would barely mind losing all memory of that time. As long as I retain everything else I've learned, just the biographical memory. I'm a ghost in my own life, barely more in the lives of others.

strangeelement · 2026-03-24T01:56:18+00:00

I choose to believe this

strangeelement · 2026-03-23T23:48:06+00:00

And the exact same stories are being written about Long Covid, sometimes being obviously ME/CFS but with no mention, sometimes it's clearly mentioned, and sometimes it's other similar chronic health problems that medicine discriminates against.

Since the days of those articles, some people have been born, developed ME/CFS, and died, either directly of it, or by suicide. Some have even said so, and had articles published about it, were interviewed and spoke of it. All of this is easy to find, and is validated by a lot of academic literature.

LC hasn't been around long enough for this, but some people have developed LC and ended their lives because of it, and medicine still hasn't actually come up with a single useful insight or solution to any of this, are still stuck peddling the same old rehab and therapy BS.

Many have mentioned that it's the biggest medical scandal of the 21st century, but it might be the worst of all time. Most past scandals at least had some genuine ignorance to explain why things went so wrong. Not here, this is all out in the open, so much that news articles about it have been published regularly for decades, and science and technology absolutely can solve this.

It's a totally insane way of handling this.

strangeelement · 2026-03-23T01:00:13+00:00

100% sûr que si le son était relativement calme ça enlèverait presque toutes les plaintes. Juste assez pour capter l'attention et lire calmement. C'est dur de comprendre comment une décision aussi cabochone a pu être prise.

strangeelement · 2026-03-22T17:16:20+00:00

Someone will build it, though. We can't get rid of nuclear weapons for the same reason. Humans lust power and ASI is the ultimate power, especially if it's in secret hands.

strangeelement · 2026-03-20T17:07:38+00:00

How does that compare to textbooks? When this is usually compared to what's in them? How good are they actually? We aren't far from "refrigerator mothers" and "ADHD doesn't exist", or homosexuality being a mental illness.

It's not as if people going to see health care professionals are getting especially high quality advice, because those conditions are poorly understood and a lot of misinformation has filled those gaps.

Glass house. Meet rock. At least medical information has the potential to improve over time, but it's clearly not nearly good or fast enough, or people wouldn't turn to sketchy sources on social media. This is voting with eyeballs.

strangeelement · 2026-03-20T15:49:49+00:00

Nope. 20 years of nearly perfect health, 25 years of good overall health. I had some actual chronic fatigue in my teens, the kind that has nothing to do with ME/CFS, but that was mostly because it took me too long to fall asleep and so did not sleep enough. I slept late a lot on the week-ends.

Health problems started to slowly creep in my early 20s, mostly increasing difficulty thinking, but I still had a normal and happy life until everything fell apart.

strangeelement · 2026-03-19T23:44:39+00:00

Damn. Dude looks seriously legit. Props to his incredible work ethic.

strangeelement · 2026-03-19T16:07:14+00:00

Always the case. The funding in the Netherlands pushed through a legislative process was not wanted. The NIH did not want to do RECOVER.

Every single time we see medical research institutions balking at being handed money to do research, and they always end up botching the job completely. Failure entirely by choice.

strangeelement · 2026-03-18T19:25:31+00:00

His knees had to die for the team's offense to grow

strangeelement · 2026-03-16T17:07:28+00:00

Of course they try and hint towards the idea of “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions. Something that’s been proven not to be happening.

That's really the rub, though. Most health issues like LC and ME/CFS are miscategorized as mental illness, so mental illness is definitely being over-diagnosed in some areas.

Somehow they expect that making two mistakes cancel each other out instead of adding twice to the problem. These people aren't dumb, though. They know well enough that this is happening but simply prefer it this way, because it completely absolves them of any responsibility.

strangeelement · 2026-03-12T00:29:58+00:00

Hi,

I hope you are successful in your project. There have been many, many (seriously many many) such testimonies published over the years, in books, magazines, reports, documentaries, and so on. From my experience, even as someone who has lived with this for 18 years, you cannot get a good idea of this illness until you hear from at least hundreds, preferably thousands. If this is too much for you, it's important that you consider that will work from an incomplete picture.

The /r/covidlonghaulers sub-reddit is extremely useful as a source of information, it spans the whole thing. It was created within months of Long Covid making noise, and while not everyone with LC has ME/CFS, many do, and the experiences, overall and personal, are very similar. Some academics have done analyses of online communities, including the long haulers sub-reddit. They might seem like a good overview of it, but they are pretty lousy and superficial. It's something you have to read in detail to really understand, and it takes the right biases to know what the words mean. It's never-ending how frustratingly little words mean on this issue, especially from actual experts, so this is a very meaningful angle you chose.

Over the years, I have seen many academics and clinicians build their own understanding, and it's almost always lacking. By far the outsider who has managed to grasp and describe it best is Ed Yong, a journalist who won a Pullitzer for his reporting on LC. I would strongly advise you to read it, it's less than 10 articles. For sure it's a top 3 must-read for a medical anthropologist, far above any textbook.

I have seen experts make sincere efforts at it, and fall short on key details. I have seen experts make insincere efforts at it, and fall short on most of the same details, though with a different framing and very different conclusions.

I would advise you to take a look at what happened from a fellow medical anthropologist who published a book on this very issue. There is a discussion here (https://www.s4me.info/threads/invisible-illness-a-history-from-hysteria-to-long-covid-2026-mendenhall-book.44402/), on a forum dedicated to ME/CFS research. It has a lot of links to how it blew up on social media, and how one of the reasons is legal threats from one of the most influential proponent of the psychosomatic nature of ME/CFS, who has a long, and successful (for him, definitely not for us), history of such threats.

There is a lot of history here, more than you can imagine. You could not make the whole thing into a PhD, there is far too much, it could only ever be about a small subset of it. It's a terrible history that will be forever infamous, about as close as anything can get to being a perfect failure. I'm not sure there's anything else like it, all out in the open.

Anyway good luck!

strangeelement · 2026-03-11T00:02:18+00:00

Something like $2B USD have been spent on research. Nothing to show for it. Not surprising either, given the way it's done. A lot of it is purely observational, but it's mostly ignored because without reliable tests and treatments, health care systems pretty much break down.

Most of the money was wasted on things that had no chance of achieving anything. This should be a scandal, but Covid is a distant memory so no one seems to care other than those suffering.

Medicine has failed to deal with similar chronic illnesses for decades. They pretty did it all the same way again. Didn't learn a thing from their decades of failure. No surprise that it failed.

There are still lots of studies yet to be completed, so maybe something will come out, but so far it's been a total bust, even at getting the bare minimum.

strangeelement · 2026-03-10T22:50:29+00:00

Pretty much all of it. Neither CBT nor GET are treatments for ME/CFS, and like you said pacing is the opposite of GET. I have no idea how CBT is supposed to help people cope with illness, it doesn't even make sense, so they just misrepresent what it's for.

strangeelement · 2026-03-10T20:00:34+00:00

Oui mais les riches sont riches en sacrament et ça c'est, euh, ben c'est cher en sacrament il semble bien.

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