Author: David Tuller
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My Twitter Thread about Slate’s Piece on Long Covid and Mental Illness
Slate recently ran a piece by a young journalist and Stanford neuroscience graduate student, Grace Huckins, about purported links between long Covid and mental illness. I found it problematic. For one thing, in the same sentence it linked to both a story of mine in Codastory.com and one from The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong, and asserted…
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A Letter to Psychological Medicine about Inflated FND Rate Claims
The journal NeuroImage: Clinical, an Elsevier title, recently agreed to correct the false statement that a 2010 study found functional neurological disorder to be the second-most-common diagnosis at outpatient neurology clinics. To the journal’s credit, it responded positively within days of receiving a letter about the matter from a group of us, although the correction…
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A Letter Requesting Corrections of Inflated Prevalence Rates in Nine More FND Papers
Several colleagues and I recently wrote to the journal NeuroImage: Clinical to request a correction in a 2021 article about functional neurological disorder (FND). The article included the false claim that a seminal 2010 study found that FND was the second-most-common diagnosis at outpatient neurology clinics. In fact, FND—called conversion disorder at the time—was the…
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Families with Long Covid Kids Fight Against Social Services
For decades in the UK, parents of children with what was formerly called chronic fatigue syndrome have run the risk of being accused of making or keeping their kids sick and/or not pursuing proper treatment strategies. These cases have been based on the discredited belief that graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)…
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FND Experts Agree To Correct Inflated Prevalence Claim
For years, experts in functional neurological disorder (FND) have cited a seminal study in their field to claim that the diagnosis was the second-most-common presentation at outpatient neurology clinics, with a prevalence of 16%. This claim was, and is, categorically untrue. The Scottish Neurological Symptoms Study (SNSS), which yielded multiple papers about a dozen years…
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Action For ME Report on NICE Guidelines; Brian Hughes on Myths About the Guidelines; Michael Sharpe’s San Francisco Speech
I often feel so far behind in keeping up with developments in this field. Here are a few recent items I wanted to highlight. Action For ME’s report on NHS adoption of the new NICE guidelines In October, 2021, after a protracted and highly contentious process, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence…
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Claim that CBT Is Safe Is “Misleading,” Says Dutch Ad Group
In a recent decision, the Advertising Code Foundation in the Netherlands has criticized as “misleading” a statement on the website of the Knowledge Center for Chronic Fatigue (NKCV) touting its treatment approach as “not harmful.” The decision is something of a slap at the NKCV and its co-leader, Professor Hans Knoop, a psychologist and a…
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Author Michael Alenyikov on ME and the Writing Life
Michael Alenyikov was the first person I knew with ME, or what was then being called CFIDS—chronic fatigue immune disorder syndrome. We met in the mid-1980s in NY—we were younger then!—and we both moved to San Francisco in the 1990s. Michael trained as a clinical psychologist but switched his professional focus to writing, focusing on…
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A Letter Regarding Inflated Prevalence Rates for Functional Neurological Disorder
I have posted previously about how papers on functional neurological disorder (FND) have routinely mis-cited a seminal 2010 study in asserting that the diagnosis is the second-most-common presentation at neurology clinics, with a rate of 16%. In fact, the 2010 study found that only 5.5% had FND, the new name for the antiquated Freudian construct…
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Dr Binita Kane on Kids with Long Covid
Physician Binita Kane, a lung specialist in Manchester, England, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester’s School of Biological Sciences, has been outspoken on the subject of long Covid in children. Her passion about the issue has been fueled by her own daughter’s struggle with prolonged symptoms after an acute coronavirus infection.…
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Psychologist Brian Hughes Discusses His New Book, “A Conceptual History of Psychology”
My friend and colleague Brian Hughes, a professor of psychology at the University of Galway in Ireland, recently published his latest book—“A Conceptual History of Psychology: The Mind Through Time.” Rather than dating the field of psychology to the creation and growth of university departments of psychology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,…
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Dutch CBT Study for Long Covid Proves that Unblinded Studies with Subjective Outcomes Generate Positive Reports
Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about a problematic Dutch study that had been funded by a major health agency and was being led by Hans Knoop, a professor of medical psychology at Amsterdam University Medical Centers. The study sought to test whether a course of cognitive behavior therapy starting months after a…