Why? What does "mental illness" mean to you? You go on to say it's a diagnosis of exclusion, and you don't know for sure what you had/have -- isn't that the point?
I guess we need to be careful with our definitions of "mental" in "mental illness". For example, major depression responds rapidly to ketamine (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9696-ketamine-relieves...), and other NMDA antagonists may prove clinically useful in treating that "mental" illness.
However, there's also the "maladaptive beliefs" side of "mental illness" which may be applicable to depression -- change how you think, change how you feel emotionally -- but their application to CFS as anything other than a mild management technique is absurd and has been proven time and again to be a dead end. Nevertheless, the implication from the psycho-social CFS school is that if you change how you think about your illness, you can think yourself out of your condition. That's absurd. They talk in terms of validation, needing respect, and saving face by coming up with symptoms; i.e. that you, the patient, are neurotic. It's pernicious nonsense.
The focus on viral aspects is far from a dead-end - see the work of Dr Martin Lerner and his use of valacyclovir and valgancyclovir, for example.
There was also research done in Australia that CFS may be a "hit and run" brain injury cause by a virus or viruses -- is a physically damaged brain a case of mental illness or just plain illness? Either way, it's not something that changing "maladaptive beliefs" will solve.
In my case I mean, what I had was almost certainly mental.
I strongly agree with you that mental illnesses have a very strong physical component, if not being completely physical. I think it's incorrect that they are sometimes thought of as being "imaginary" or "in your head". You don't tell someone their heart disease is "just in your heart", and you certainly wouldn't tell someone with a brain tumour to buck their ideas up!
> their application to CFS as anything other than a mild management technique is absurd and has been proven time and again to be a dead end
Given that CFS is not defined, I would strongly challenge anyone claiming that such-and-such is "proven" with regards to it.
I know the viral aspects are a big thing, at one point my doctor suspected I had post-viral fatigue syndrome (which affects people who had mono that just.. sticks around a bit after?)
Another interesting anecdote of mine is that one of my friends "had CFS" and was "cured"... she had anaemia. Like, basic, common-or-garden iron defeciency. You would not believe how many health officials she went through before a chance conversation with an ex-nurse led to the correct diagnosis. So I do wonder how many poor souls out there are suffering from crippling fatigue that could be quite simply solved!
> one of my friends "had CFS" and was "cured"... she had anaemia
Just so we're clear, this point is not in debate at all. There are indeed many possible causes of fatigue which need to be looked into. I'm sure many of them get lumped into the catch-all category of CFS before someone realizes there is a less obscure cause than EBV/HHV-6 infection.
On the other hand, my case was characterized by two phenomena which, AFAIK, are quite specific for EBV/HHV-6. (And yes, I mean "specific" in the statistical sense: they are rarely associated with any other condition, and thus, as diagnostic cues, would generate few false positives.) The first is the fact that my symptoms began after a flu-like illness, and were clearly not present before that illness. The second is that I would have the symptoms as much as 48 hours after exercise. I'm not a doctor or medical researcher, but I have yet to hear of another disease with that property. Many illnesses make exercise unpleasant, but they tend to do so at the time the exercise is taking place, or right afterwards. A 48-hour delay is bizarre. (My SWAG(†) is that it has to do with the release of growth hormone during the post-exercise recovery process. Growth hormone triggers neurogenesis, among other things, and I suspect that the virus is somehow taking advantage of or interfering with neurogenesis. Just a thought.)
(† SWAG = Scientific Wild-Assed Guess)
> Given that CFS is not defined, I would strongly challenge anyone claiming that such-and-such is "proven" with regards to it.
Fair enough, but cfshacker also has a point: some doctors have tried for years to treat CFS as a "mental illness", with very limited success.
Now to the main point:
> I strongly agree with you that mental illnesses have a very strong physical component, if not being completely physical.
Well, if that's where you're coming from, why even use the term "mental"? If you think that your condition was rooted in a neurotransmitter imbalance or something like that, why not just say that? Then we're not debating whether it had an organic cause, we're just debating what kind of organic cause.
The irony is, I absolutely do believe in psychosomatic illness. But I believe its causes are emotional. If the cause is actually physical, it seems to me this contradicts the very definition of "psychosomatic".
Why? What does "mental illness" mean to you? You go on to say it's a diagnosis of exclusion, and you don't know for sure what you had/have -- isn't that the point?
I guess we need to be careful with our definitions of "mental" in "mental illness". For example, major depression responds rapidly to ketamine (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9696-ketamine-relieves...), and other NMDA antagonists may prove clinically useful in treating that "mental" illness.
However, there's also the "maladaptive beliefs" side of "mental illness" which may be applicable to depression -- change how you think, change how you feel emotionally -- but their application to CFS as anything other than a mild management technique is absurd and has been proven time and again to be a dead end. Nevertheless, the implication from the psycho-social CFS school is that if you change how you think about your illness, you can think yourself out of your condition. That's absurd. They talk in terms of validation, needing respect, and saving face by coming up with symptoms; i.e. that you, the patient, are neurotic. It's pernicious nonsense.
The focus on viral aspects is far from a dead-end - see the work of Dr Martin Lerner and his use of valacyclovir and valgancyclovir, for example.
There was also research done in Australia that CFS may be a "hit and run" brain injury cause by a virus or viruses -- is a physically damaged brain a case of mental illness or just plain illness? Either way, it's not something that changing "maladaptive beliefs" will solve.