Why can’t we get our minds around ME?

Do you ever wake up worried that you have tiny fibres growing beneath your skin, all along your spinal column? Possibly wriggling little fibres, placed there by the government or by aliens? By aliens I don’t mean asylum seekers but proper aliens, quite probably creatures with bifurcated tongues and scaly lips from the Planet Zog. If so, you may well consider yourself to be suffering from ‘Morgellons’.

This unfortunate condition had its heyday at the turn of the century, with hundreds of thousands of people reporting to their GPs and clinics in the USA and here, pleading to have these little fibres sorted out somehow. Millions and millions of dollars were spent investigating the medical causes of the supposed disease, which also had symptoms of lethargy, torpor, inability to sleep, aching joints and limbs, pain — remember these symptoms, please, they will come in handy later on in this article. Another symptom was a blind fury on the part of sufferers at any suggestion that their illness could be in any way psychiatric in origin. It was other stuff, mysterious stuff, some of which I mentioned above, but also maybe viruses or pollution or weird electro-magnetic business. And there was a conspiracy on the part of doctors and politicians and journalists to cover it all up.

I remembered the fury with which Morgellons sufferers — and one way or another those people were suffering, remember — prosecuted their case when I wrote a short blog about another illness with a somewhat ectoplasmic pathology — ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, or yuppie flu (call it what you want). The same blind fury. I copped it rather less than the experts who have investigated this condition and come to the conclusion that it too has a significant psychiatric component, a point of view generally shared by the medical profession (even if they are sometimes a little reluctant to come out and say it, for understandable reasons).