Journal of IiME Volume 3 Issue 1 www.investinme.org Call to Action - Why I Support Invest in ME (continued) We don’t know how you get/develop/contract M.E, and we don’t know how to cure it and therefore we could all be at risk from M.E. So why are psychiatrists and the mental health sector given free reign over M.E? The simple answer is ‘kerching’ and politics/power play. There is a lot of money at stake for the treatment and research of this disease. It is in certain group’s interests to keep M.E treated as a mental illness. The Government is advised by psychiatrists about the treatment of the disease of M.E and it is in their interest to advocate mental health treatments. It is also in medical insurance companies’ financial interests to keep M.E treated as a mental illness. If M.E funding were to go to the physical health camp, it would have to battle with the big boys such as Cancer and Heart Disease for funding. In the mental health camp there is far less competition. The ring of ‘kerching’ is louder than the cry of truth at the moment. However the truth will out, and the sooner M.E is seen and treated as a physical illness the better for everyone. This is not just better for M.E patients and their carers, it is better for everyone. The false security of M.E getting labelled as something in mental health is a dangerous myth. You cannot catch a mental health disease, but you can catch/develop a physical disease. Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease were considered mental illnesses before they were wrestled out of mental health and put in their rightful place in physical health treatment. M.E is not the first and will probably not be the last disease to be wrongly taken by the mental health sector. By supporting Invest in ME you are helping liberate everyone. This (event) happened to Sophia but it could happen to anyone of us. My sister was condemned as mentally ill and referred to a psychiatrist, even though no mental health checks were done and it was Invest in ME (Charity Nr. 1114035) blatantly obvious to anyone that Sophia was severely physically ill. Sophia refused treatment at an ME clinic where they treat ME patients with methods such as GET (Graded Exercise) and CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy),. These treatments have been proven to make M.E patients WORSE. The clinics’ own statistics state that Graded Exercise makes people with severe ME worse. Sophia was given a ‘get well by a certain date or be sectioned’ ultimatum which she failed to get well for. Sophia refused to go to the clinic because she was just too ill to be able to risk treatments which would probably cause her great harm. This was a sane decision by Sophia. As a result of making a sane decision an insane one was taken by her doctors. Sophia was sectioned into a mental health hospital and she never recovered from this experience. Sophia’s could not tolerate light, noise, movement or smells. She lived the last few years of her life in the dark, in bed and couldn’t even read a book or listen to music. She was in constant pain and if this were not bad enough, she had to live under a blanket of fear and was treated as if she were mentally ill, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. My sister’s post-mortem revealed the physical evidence of M.E in her spinal column. It is a shocking disgrace that Sophia had to die to be believed. I trained as a nurse through my sister’s illness and I saw how M.E was viewed from the other side. I never confided in anyone during my nurse training and nurse working time about my sister having M.E, because of the stigma attached to this disease. I didn’t risk confiding in people because when I had tried confiding in people before, I was met with plastic psychiatry about ‘perhaps she has unresolved issues’. If you got M.E from having ‘issues’ the whole country would be down with it. There was also the risk that a well meaning but ignorant person would add fuel to the fire and go to the Page 36/76
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