[kennywinker]

That you can see improvements in people with long covid by giving them SSRIs isn’t clear evidence it’s partly fake or a “social contagion”. Whatever improvements recorded are just as easily explained by the fact that being sick for months is depressing and alienating and a bunch of people think you’re faking it.

On top of that, the SSRI article you linked suggests a biochemical mechanism by which SSRIs might be acting (i.e. not by making something “fake” go away, by actually treating the cause of something real)

[MrBuddyCasino]

Why then do SSRIs also work on fibromyalgia, Morgellons, Chronic Lime and Chronic Fatigue?

[Aurornis]

Morgellons isn’t a real disease. It’s a mental health condition.

SSRIs do not “work on” those other conditions, but depression is highly comorbid with serious chronic illnesses. SSRIs improving some symptoms is to be expected when depression symptoms overlap with the condition.

[MrBuddyCasino]

I'm somewhat open to this line of thinking, but it seems in these cases, there is a very fuzzy boundary between the symptoms of depression and "the real illness": brain fog, lack of energy etc.

I've seen healthy, active and successful people be affected, where the cause of "long covid" seems unlikely to be psychological. But there is no denying that, shall we say "a certain type" of person seems to be overrepresented in these cases, and for them it is very attractive to attach the label "long covid" to something that previously existed.

I guess that until we have discovered the biological mechanism underlying this phenomenon, it will be hard to cleanly separate these two cases, but from what I've seen I find it likely that this bipartition really exists.

[Aurornis]

> but it seems in these cases, there is a very fuzzy boundary between the symptoms of depression and "the real illness": brain fog, lack of energy etc.

It is possible for someone with depression to misdiagnose themself with Long COVID or CFS if they don’t understand the conditions. A lot of people will avoid mental health diagnoses in favor of other explanations because they don’t want to accept that they have a mental health condition.

Where you’re confused is that these conditions are not exclusively defined by “brain fog” and lack of energy.

CFS has specific criteria such as specific post-exertional malaise that set it apart from depression in a very concrete way. Any informed practitioner or screener for study acceptance is going to identify the difference.

Onset also matters. If someone claims they developed Long COVID and the trigger was a bad breakup with no known case of COVID it’s easy to dismiss. A key feature of Long COVID is that it starts with a case of COVID.

As for your posts: The fact that you included Morgellon’s (a fictitious disease akin to delusional parasitosis) with other real conditions suggests that you are picking up some weird information from somewhere. Please don’t speak so confidently about these topics you don’t understand. Curiosity is good, but dismissing other people’s conditions as mental illness is really awful.

[kennywinker]

If you have to speak euphemistically about a “certain type” of person, i’d like you to consider the possibility that you are letting your own biases and stereotypes effect how legitimate you think someone else’s health issues are.

[watwut]

I find it faily intuitive to think that a drug can work on one thing and not on other thing.