The Mind Body Paradigm, An inevitable pseudoscientific extension to Capitalism and Ableism

[This page is a draft, not a finished article]

The placebo effect is way overstated in popular culture, Cochrane review says it’s only been proven for pain and nausea, two things we can only measure through subjective reports, not for changing any sort of biological reality or disease mechanism.

There is no way to conclusively prove something is “mind body”. It’s all a theory. It’s a popular one because

1) It is supported by research pushed by insurance companies and governments, who are happy to find a reason something is “mind body”. It means they don’t need to waste precious resources treating whatever it is like a serious disease. They can recommend the cheap treatments of exercise and therapy and be on their way. I mean seriously, Look at the conflict of interest section on all the major “biopsychosocial” (BPS) studies. Every single author is a “consultant”and recieves heavy financial compensation from insurance companies. This is generally a rare thing in medicine; but in BPS studies it’s almost every author. 2) It fits with human prejudices. Everyone wants to believe that some disabled people could just “get better” by changing their mind. It’s much easier to think that and believe the constant media bombardment of “miracle treatments” than to believe you truly have no control and any day you could become disabled like that too. People don’t want to believe that, so they want to feel superior by thinking it couldn’t happen to them, and even if it did, they’d be able to get out of it.

Obviously everything is mind body in that every sensation a human feels is interpreted by their brain. But that’s about the extent of it. The problem is nearly always the biological reality causing the sensation, not the way the brain interprets it.

And maybe in some cases it is. But based on the evidence we have, we can count as quite likely the phenomenon is much overblown, and we have no way to conclusively prove it is true in any one case. We don’t have a way to prove that right now, but medicine has taken it as a founding axiom, and it entrenches through every aspect of how patients are treated, despite it being unproven.

The Relation to Medical Ableism

It allows doctors to treat patients as “irrational agents” and lead to drastic measures such as forced institutionalisation. All that without any proof. It’s unethical as hell.

Medicine has an unfortunate ego problem. The false assumption that when no biological abnormalities are found, physical symptoms must have a psychological cause. It has been proven wrong many times throughout history, but nothing has really changed.

Capitalist Philosophy

In a capitalist society, we’re taught everything is a meritocracy. You’re rewarded with riches if you contribute a lot, and if you give the bare minimum, you’ll get the bare minimum in return. This is the ideology we are conditioned with. (That’s how it’s atleast supposed to work)

Disability completely breaks that paradigm. People who are unable to contribute through no fault of their own. How does that fit within the system?

An invented sort of mind-body agency is the best way to clumisly fix the philosophical contradiction of disability in a capitalist system. You need to want to recover, you need to always engage in the consumerist behaviour of trying new “treatments”, even if there is no scientific basis for them.

If you look at it, the “BPS” view is deeply entrenched into capitalism. Selling ludicrously expensive courses like the “lightning process” and “brain retraining programs”. 

We even push it into the most biologically proven and understood illnesses of all. We frame cancer as a fight, if someone recovers, it’s because they really wanted to live and pushed through it, if someone dies, it’s because they let go. That’s not why someone lived or died, the biological reality in their bodies is. Same thing as the whole conception of illness being a temporary thing in modern society. We are taught that illness is something that happens, and then you fight it and get better or you die, we aren’t told that illness is something that can happen, and then if you’re unlucky, it can last forever. Medicine prefers to label patients as “hysterical” and “deviant” than to face that reality.

the illusion of control over your health is part of capitalism’s opium for the masses. The principles of our society crumble if you admit you can do everything right and still fail.

Human Nature

we humans are storytellers. always have been. we dont tell things how they are, we tell things how we experience them.

same thing for illness, we love to add agency and frame it as a fight and such.

snd the psychosomatic propaganda has come through to lots of us. In austria, I had a period where I felt better, coincidentally I stopped tracking my symptoms.

I associated symptom tracking with suffering, and therefore concluded that it’s by stopping tracking and not paying attention to the symptoms anymore that I got better. So I started ignoring to them. Then I came home to switzerland and look what happened I had a massive permanent disabling event.

I didn’t stop having symptoms because I stopped tracking them. I stopped feeling the need to track them because I stopped having them, that feels obvious now, but the psychosomatic things we are bombarded with make us second guess ourselves and everything.

That’s why the few people who do recover often say they recovered because they started doing more or stopped thinking about what was happening. A lot of us with the disease do that, but most dont get better, it actually usually leads to pem and makes you worse. As long term GET results show. But people associate doing more with getting better (obviously) and the BPS stuff we are constantly pushed (it’s endless) mixes up the correlation and causation.

There are millions of people with ME, and the ones who assign some sort of “mental aspect” to the story are the few voices that get pushed by things like the media (they love a good, i started thinking positively and cured myself story), by the BPS establishment, by companies such as the lightning process making millions off selling exercise and brain retraining courses, and pushed by a non-neglibeable amount people who recover (assuming they even had ME in the first place) who coincidentally are by far the loudest voices since this disease tends to take away the ability to share our experiences severe sufferers. These voices are tiny amounts like tens of thousands of voices that are massively amplified, compared to the millions of us with the disease.

A century or two ago, these voices would be the ones saying god cured them, now we’ve changed god, to a god of individualism and consumerism which means people claim they did it themselves by buying alternative medicine products or “brain retraining” courses.

The Resulting Societal Misunderstanding and Isolation

What doesn’t the world understand about Chronic in chronic disease. My friends and family are so sweet but I’m tired of getting told “get better soon” or “hope you’re recovering” etc.

Case of MDD

there are two quite different things that get called “depression”

There’s reactive depression, which a normal psychological reaction where you feel down and sad about life lose energy etc. It happens in relation to an event, ie. someone close dying etc.

then there’s major depressive disorder (biological depression) which is a biological illness that while it can impact your mood isnt really based on that

It’s caused by a large mix of genetic factors and immune dysregulations which manifest as a sort of neurological disease,

it creates differences in brain structure, impacts the HPA Axis, and Glutamate and GABA.

alternative “mind body therpies”  could maybe help you but it wont change the biological illness if that’s what you have. Even therapy while it can help you cope with the illness it doesn’t make MDD go away.

In a lot of people MDD goes away with time and/or medication.

MDD is kinda in the same stage “CFS” was in 2010. There isn’t a biological test so the diagnosis criteria is kind of all over the place and not that accurate, and there aren’t any objective markers to base clinical trials on so doctors fool themselves into thinking therapy or exercise will cure it. 

And of course those things help you deal with the illness and the toll it takes but it doesn’t change the biological reality.

Even illnesses that we now know are biological like Major Depressive Disorder (this is different than reactive depression) and we have the same kind of proof therapy doesn’t help the biological basis, we still push therapy as a “cure”. Medicine is obsessed with this ableist “mind body” assumption, if you recovered it’s because you deserved it, but if you didn’t recover it’s because you didn’t try as many treatments, you wallowed in your illness, etc etc. 

ME is far from the only illness which is kinda being thrown as an “it’s psychological” because we havent figured out a proper test yet

the stigma benefits the insurance companies and governments who have to spend less money caring about it if it’s stigmatised and blamed on pagients and we say therapy and exercise will cure it and insurance companies and governments are basically the two only structures who fund research and get to decide guidelines and fully control the medical system so they kinda choose eveything

Case of ME

The idea that people with ME don’t want to get better is absurd. Yet it has been central to societal views about chronically ill people

Addressing Counterarguments

older people “letting go” makes sense evolutionarily. When you’re no longer needed and can’t contribute it makes evolutionary sense and would increase survival of communities and surplus resources if the person goes away.

Is there any data for the college kids thing? How do we know it isn’t that they get more sick when they go home (although maybe travel and exhaustion could contribute to increased exposure and weakened immune response) but that they tend to let themselves rest and fight the illness while at home vs while in school they tend to ignore it and go to class.