A petition regarding a young woman from Denmark dropped onto my computer over the weekend. I had not heard of her case, and did not want to sign unless I knew more about her. She has apparently been sectioned and is being held against her will. She has ME, and is said to be going downhill. I have no idea how to understand her case, or why she is in this position, as all reports say she is adult, and has been taken into the institution where she is now. What did come up in my search, which wasn't too deep, were two things. First that there are similar case/s in the UK, and second this document,
http://funktionellelidelser.dk/fileadmi ... erial_.pdf, which when I read it concerned me greatly, not least for some of its antecedents and relationships.
The biggest concern I had though was that people with little understood physical conditions that may well prove to have organic causes are being re-defined and classified by psychologists and psychiatrists as being 'functional'. I have a little experience of this kind of attitude to long term illness, in that I know someone, now retired, with MS, who was given this label a few years ago, and had to fight to have it removed. The person concerned has worked, and brought up children and struggled since her mid twenties with a form of relapsing remitting MS which has now considerably undermined general health, and no longer remits to any significant degree. This we are told is fairly normal for older patients with MS. So it was a nice try by the doctor concerned, but eventually an own goal because there was substantial evidence to the contrary.
The reason I am bringing this here for what I hope will be some clarity is that these redefinitions appear in the new 'official' (read US) classification of psychiatric disorders, which is pretty widely accepted around the world, with little or no challenge to its authority, yet they are re-classifying things which are outside of their field of expertise.
The young woman in the petition is called Karina Hansen, she has ME, and is said by her sister to now be non-responsive, and was unable to recognise her sister when she visited. She is said to be treated by the protocol above, something which has also been done to a British patient living here in the UK. The process uses a lot of CBT processes, something which we have seen integrated into the WRAG and even JSA commitments. I have no problem when such things are used appropriately, but do not believe they can be used to help people get jobs when there are none, or to convince people they are well when they are sick. The point at which it lost credibility for me was when I realised that one of the conditions that they are trying to re-classify as 'severe bodily distress' is IBS, which is a pretty disabling condition. I also balked at the title of the document. I suppose I find it wrong and despicable that vested interests are re-classifying things that science does not yet understand.
Oh, and pages 33-41 are very interesting, and did I just spot the name Wessely or some contraction of it? Hmm. Oh, and I did sign, I thought the whole thing stank.