Column

The ME generation

If you’re ill, see a doctor— and if you’re not then keep quiet, says Eric

The crusty old judge who said that a woman with repetitive strain injury had an ‘egg-shell personality’ was wide of the mark. Most people with RSI have the sensitivity of rhinos. They do not crumble with reality’s icy blasts, they just get iller and dumber. Had the judge graduated from the University of Life he would have been more accurate in his pronouncements, if no more prudent.

Why not tell the truth about RSI? And ME, and hyperactivity in children too? They are inventions of morbid minds. Those who cannot function under the pressures of modern life, for whatever reason, have three options. They can become dependent on people or chemicals, they can become criminal, or they can become ill.

Few of us want to be ill. Most of us shy away from diagnoses, even if we are as sick as parrots. Who wants to have multiple sclerosis, or diabetes, or cancer? Worthy health professionals often struggle so hard to convince the sick that they should adapt to their condition and ‘get real’ that they grow weary themselves.

Not so the RSI victims, and their ME buddies. They pursue their diagnoses despite the absence of evidence and in the teeth of official resistance, forming pressure groups and contesting clinical judgements, involving trades unions and struggling through the state bureaucracy to get disability benefits for their non-existent disorders. They have chosen the sick role for life, and though many will leave it for something less alienated and more real, many probably don’t.

Medicine comes to the rescue of these sad souls, in two ways. The myopic preoccupations that scientists have with neurotransmitters and muscle fatiguability mirror the tunnel vision of the victims of RSI and ME. Not for them the wise last words of Pasteur — ‘the terrain is everything, the organism nothing’ — but instead an obsession with organic minutiae and a thorough neglect of their own social and psychological context. Should sceptical doctors doubt their self-chosen diagnoses, they have yet more evidence of Medicine’s arrogant delusions of omniscience, and become victims of professional’s ignorance as well as of disease.

Perhaps we should not blame them. Perhaps it is better to have RSI than to be a failure in the competitive, insecure and unsatisfying world of office work. Perhaps it is better to invent an organic disorder called ME than to suffer the stigm of depression, or worse, depressive personality. Perhaps it’s better to have hyperactive children than not to be a good enough parent.

We should show kindness towards such sad people, but that does not include tolerance of their pathological thinking and worse behaviour. If they want the sick role they are welcome to it, but not at everyone else’s expense. The outspoken judge said the wrong things, but for the right reason. Eric the Heretic will buy him a pint, even if no one else will.