CBT psychiatry is a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money

Hilary Patten wrote (p 94): “ME has been classified as a neurological illness by the WHO since 1969, and the UK Government have stated that they accept it is a physical illness. Despite this, all research and treatment funding has been given to the psychiatric profession who insist, against all medical evidence, that it is an ‘aberrant illness belief’. Sufferers are mixed up in CFS clinics with patients who have a number of different fatigue‐causing illnesses, including mental disorders, and given totally inappropriate psychological treatments that have been found by all patients groups to actually make them worse. This is a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent on biomedical research. There have been a number of deaths from ME in which pathogens have been found in the heart, central nervous system, gut and muscles at autopsy. Recent research has found a previously undiscovered prion in these profoundly affected patients. Until the UK psychiatric profession release their stranglehold on this physical illness there will never be effective treatment for ME in the UK. ME sufferers desperately need a diagnostic test to be developed. This needs funding to be redirected away from the endless and useless psychiatric research and put into biomedical research”.