First I want to say that determining something as Psychological doesn't put you in much better of a position than just saying something is a somatic condition we just don't understand yet. Secondly, to sufferers who are upset by this idea, please don't be. Yes, when the vast majority of people hear that a condition is psychological, they somehow think it's easier to deal with, less real, madeup or somehow not physical. This is wrong and any good physician will treat you with the exact same empathy and respect whether they believe something is psychogenic or somatic.
Ok, with that out of the way, the answer to your question is yes and no. Some folks emphasize the comorbidity of ME/CFS with depression to try and establish ME/CFS as a psychogenic illness. Some cases of CFS improve with the introduction SSRIs. Which further embeds this belief. But its entirely possible that the depression is a result of the day-to-day suffering. And the improvement reported with SSRIs isn't just a result of the sufferer's generally improved disposition.
The main difficulty with CFS is that it is currently a bucket diagnosis. So, you end with people in that bucket that have other diseases. For example, there are probably a good number of people in the CFS bucket that have an autoimmune disorder like Rheumatoid Arthritis or Spondylopathies because the mechanisms of diagnoses for these are somewhat unreliable and the effects of treatment are purely subjective if blood tests are consistently normal.
Without some differentiator, it's really difficult to study the condition with confidence. Any effect or symptom sampling will be diluted if our bucket has multiple diseases in it. It's because of this that I think sufferers should resist the temptation to pitch their tent around the CFS flag. But I do understand the yearning to have a name by which to call your affliction.
It is not generally true that physicians will treat people with somatic diseases well (or at all) if they personally believe symptoms are actually caused by psychological issues.
This is an unproductive, even dangerous thing to tell sufferers.
Thanks, I agree with basically all this. I would only mention that medicine has a better track record of developing treatments to disorders with a somatic cause than purely psychological ones.
"Comorbidity" - but which causes which? Depression can absolutely lead to fatigue. But if you were healthy, and suddenly you have absolutely no energy, and your brain is fuzzy, and you're sleeping 14 hours a day and still don't have any energy the other 10 hours, well, that's depressing.
> But its entirely possible that the depression is a result of the day-to-day suffering. And the improvement reported with SSRIs isn't just a result of the sufferer's generally improved disposition.
Ok, with that out of the way, the answer to your question is yes and no. Some folks emphasize the comorbidity of ME/CFS with depression to try and establish ME/CFS as a psychogenic illness. Some cases of CFS improve with the introduction SSRIs. Which further embeds this belief. But its entirely possible that the depression is a result of the day-to-day suffering. And the improvement reported with SSRIs isn't just a result of the sufferer's generally improved disposition.
The main difficulty with CFS is that it is currently a bucket diagnosis. So, you end with people in that bucket that have other diseases. For example, there are probably a good number of people in the CFS bucket that have an autoimmune disorder like Rheumatoid Arthritis or Spondylopathies because the mechanisms of diagnoses for these are somewhat unreliable and the effects of treatment are purely subjective if blood tests are consistently normal.
Without some differentiator, it's really difficult to study the condition with confidence. Any effect or symptom sampling will be diluted if our bucket has multiple diseases in it. It's because of this that I think sufferers should resist the temptation to pitch their tent around the CFS flag. But I do understand the yearning to have a name by which to call your affliction.