It’s All In Your Head

Anyone who copes with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Fibromyalgia (FM) knows there are people out there with all sorts of theories about what’s wrong with them. We’ve heard it all: You’re just depressed. If you’d exercise more, you’d feel better. The insulting “it’s all in your head.” And on and on.

The worst insult is probably: Everybody gets tired.

We know that! Before we got sick, we just got tired, too. But this fatigue is far beyond anything I (or most of the rest of us) would wish on anyone. If you can imagine how you feel on the worst day of having the flu, you can imagine how somebody with CFS feels on a good day.

That’s why it took me more than two months before I could get past the opening line to read the article I’m about to recommend.

Can people think themselves sick? This is what psychiatrist Simon Wessely explores. His research into the causes of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf war syndrome….

I read that, and while I didn’t dismiss the article, I did get angry at the person who’d recommended that I read it.

I then ignored it for over two months. Through countless reboots and browser saves, I left it open in a tab in FireFox. It became one more thing on my To Do (Someday™) List.

The article to which I refer is a 13 March 2009 interview by Clare Wilson in NewScientist: Mind over body? It’s obvious from the interview that British Psychiatrist Simon Wessely, founder of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research and Treatment Unit at King’s College London and the first specialist NHS clinic for CFS at what is now King’s College Hospital, isn’t out to win friends. But once you get beyond the controversies, you come to realize that he does make some valid points, among them:

Roughly a third of people completely recover and a third show good improvement. About a third we can’t do much for.

We all celebrate those who have had any improvement in his or her CFS condition. We envy (yet cheer!) those who have made a complete recovery. Of those of us who remain in that latter group, we prefer not to give up hope. And so, in search of finding that gem of information that will help us find our step toward a miracle cure, we eventually read articles like Mind over body? and pray.

Articles like Mind over body? validate that there simply isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for CFS, FM, IBS, and MCS.

The everyday realities coping with those conditions is that it isn’t all in one’s head. It’s there and in every other fiber of one’s being. Occasionally, it can be pushed aside long enough to allow for another fleeting glimpse at normal life.

Read More:

Mind over body?

New Scientist: Letters in response to Simon Wessely interview

…In the UK, the ME Association has just collated results from the largest ever survey of patient opinion, with over 4000 respondents. Over 50 per cent reported that behavioural treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy and graded exercise therapy were either ineffective or made their condition worse.

NOTE: The New Scientist received more than 485 responses to Mind over body? Of those, they reprinted 2 in their magazine. If you wish to voice your thoughts on Simon Wessely’s article, please post them in the Comments section following this post. As I am able, I will see that non-spam/sham ones appear on this site.

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