Daisy Chain

IF Kipling Nimrod Elgar youtu.be/QUezlxocFsk via @YouTube

When you go find your cat for emotional support but they're going through something themselves

I don't think it makes sense in this context because if the symptom is really incompatible with medical conditions it shouldn't be necessary to make a separate statement saying that it is not better explained by another medical or mental disorder. Also it's very strange because the way FND is ruled in is by claiming the positive signs rule out other conditions rather than being positive findings in themselves.

@Daisychain100 @KH118118 That’s a criterion for almost all conditions. You rule in one diagnosis and rule out others. That does not make it a diagnosis of exclusion because you still have to rule it in.

Functional Neurological Disorder is not listed as a diagnosis of exclusion 👇, and since when did an American psychiatric handbook become the global standard? When healthcare professionals repeat inaccurate claims, it isn’t debate. It’s a failure of duty of care to patients. #FND

my thoughts are just noise my feelings are just sensations my anxiety is just my amygdala my love for others is just oxytocin etc etc etc This logic is exhausting, reductive, and incoherent. You can't declare one part of you as noise and then make up meaning for yourself anymore than you can tell yourself you love the taste of dry chicken but that you find the taste of ice cream revolting.

I add to this @BBCr4today with this article in the Guardian quoting this by Dr O'Sullivan and she does quote she knows about having long Covid and obviously the very familiar symptoms neurodivergent people have a propensity to have to due to variant connective tissue #hypermobility (affects all systems in body). Patients are patients but with unexplained medical symptoms because they are not in silos. Some people are very linear. Poor Anna in the aritcle had a diagnosis of ADHD but told it's all in her head by Dr O'Sullivan and tried to go back to work but couldn't as exhausted, pain, brain fog but is told by her neurologist it's not ADHD. It is connected. I was one of those discounted all my life without diagnoses until it was nearly too late. I had lost my education much earlier on, I lost my income, nearly my house, my friends and nearly my life. Only by finding out why and doing the real research and the more people joining our charity are we finding this out and our thousands of members. We have to do better, let us talk @sedsconnetive we know we are only a user led grassroutes charity but we do have leading researchers as Patrons or advisers. ttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/01/the-number-of-people-with-chronic-conditions-is-soaring-are-we-less-healthy-than-we-used-to-be-or-overdiagnosing-illness #Connective tissues #neurodivergence #EDS

This kind of thing seems edgy and it generates clicks and book sales but it’s over the edge. This physician’s core ideas fail basic biomedical ethics, violate her oath, and probably go against her license. The first obligation is to do no harm. Withholding information isn’t that.

@BBCr4today @amolrajan @BBCSounds It also ignores the much bigger problem of delayed and missed diagnoses that could be treated stopping people from living the lives they wish to.

@BBCr4today @amolrajan @BBCSounds This is silly because it assumes how a patient behaves is determined by their diagnosis rather than their symptoms as if patients can't think and experience for themselves.

“When you turn someone into a patient, they can begin acting like a patient” Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan, author of 'The Age of Diagnosis', argues that the costs of a medical diagnosis can sometimes outweigh the benefits. Listen to Radical with @amolrajan on @BBCSounds

"A society that has secured abundant energy, industrial production, and physical safety creates the conditions in which political attention can migrate upward into questions of identity, moral positioning, and self-actualization." 1/6

I’m trying not to get angry at the people who are arguing this with experts. It’s not their fault really, because the literature around this is a mess. But please, if you don’t fully understand a topic, just listen to the experts. PEM is unique to ME/CFS.

@EyeOfGnosis When one of the people listed as an author has written books about "functional " illnesses with titles that include "imaginary" and "sleeping beauties" it's difficult to take anything the article says about feminism or challenging stigma seriously.

Analysis of an article claiming FND is a feminist issue: jumpshare.com/share/GVCulmK4…

What isn't fair to patients is for people not knowing what they are talking about to use al kinds of falsely balanced and straw men arguments to not only sooth their own gut, but to show how after decades of inflicted harms they are open to repeating it all the same.

Please help! I am Teddy, The Vicarage Cat, and X has locked me out of my old account and mum can't remember the password! Please follow me and retweet this to find all my old friends!! #CatsOnX #CatsOnTwitter #cats #catsoftwitter #catsofx

ME is utterly horrible. I know because I have a moderate version of it (nb. people call it different names - post-viral fatigue, ME). I used to be very fit; I could do tons of press ups, boxed, ran & did gymnastics. Now I have to be careful. The NHS is terrible at diagnosing it. Something I feel quite cross about because you get worse if it's not identified quickly. Also, if you are a very busy person, BE careful. Take relaxation seriously.

Neuroscience has a precise term for this. It's called allostatic load. Your brain runs a stress response system called the HPA axis. Hypothalamus fires corticotropin-releasing factor to the pituitary, pituitary sends ACTH to the adrenal glands, adrenals flood cortisol into the bloodstream. In a healthy system, the stressor ends, cortisol drops, you recover. The cycle completes. Allostatic load is what happens when the cycle never completes. The stressor persists. Cortisol stays elevated. And your brain does something remarkable: it recalibrates. It shifts the baseline. The emergency state becomes the new normal. You stop registering the alarm because the alarm is now always on. This is why you "keep taking it." Your HPA axis has adapted to chronic activation. The Framingham Heart Study found that people with persistently elevated cortisol showed measurable brain volume loss and memory impairment in their 40s, years before any clinical symptoms appeared. Harvard research found cortisol exposure can shrink dendritic spines by 20% in just three weeks. The hippocampus, the brain region responsible for forming new memories and regulating emotional responses, can lose 10 to 15% of its volume under chronic stress. And the prefrontal cortex, the region that would help you make the rational decision to leave the situation, is one of the first areas degraded by sustained cortisol. The longer you endure, the worse your hardware gets at evaluating whether you should still be enduring. Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller coined the term in 1993. He called it "the price of adaptation." Your body is doing exactly what evolution designed it to do: survive at any cost. The body keeps the score. The brain pays the bill.

📢 I am happy to see tremendous interest in our new paper on #POTS, #MECFS & #LongCOVID as neuroimmune disorders! Over 15,000 views & downloads since its publication! 🎉 It's how we change the narrative and the field! 🚀 If you missed it, read here: 👇 dovepress.com/postural-ortho…

🆕 My Monday post just dropped “We should define for ourselves what we treat and how we treat it, instead of forcing psychology into misshapen slots defined by health insurers and broken healthcare systems.” read for free👇 open.substack.com/pub/jonathansh…?

If you gaslight a kid by effectively telling them that there’s nothing wrong with their harmful family environment and their real problem is cognitive errors or other nonsense, you might get them to conform to the toxic family better, but at an enormous cost. Many people die in their 20s and beyond following this.

📸 instagram.com/jonathanshedle…

@awaisaftab I wrote a Substack piece on exactly this topic (2 min read) jonathanshedler.substack.com/p/the-psycholo…