The whole business with Professor Garner's recovery story has really helped me. As previously recorded, patients had moved on from threats and character abuse and started calling me a Nazi, (like they do many others who try to help #MEcfs patients). I was ready to accept that people with M.E were unsavable.
Part of recovery after 35yrs is enjoying it, but the M.E community were making one of the most brilliant experiences of my entire life, dark, depressing and awful.
But when I looked at the M.E community's responses to Prof Garner's recovery story I was taken aback.
M.E activists' anger was trivial, uninformed and arrogant. It was entitled, it was dogmatic, it was ridiculous.
But fundamentally, it was shallow.
Clang! Clang! Clang! We're victims!
Clang! Clang! Clang! Doctors are gaslighting us!
Clang! Clang! Clang! We're mistreated!
And you just say: Well, if that's true, how come the head of this charity or that action group privately says the exact opposite?
And the anger flees. It runs away. It is founded on pure ignorance.
DO NO HARM
What's that M.E patients? You don't like being mistreated? You don't like being disbelieved? You don't like being demonised or targeted as crazy? You don't like neglect?
Well, all of these things are done in public by M.E activists to M.E patients.
But not a peep out of them all then!!
And that's an education.
Selective anger, selective offence, selective rage?
No. No. No.
If this community were angry about mistreatment it would be angry about *all* mistreatment.
In reality, M.E community wrath is used to push a political agenda.
As the charity founder told me:
"It's business, James".
And when you call it out, like all bullying, eventually, it runs away. And when it does, we can start once again to seriously talk about how to cure #MEcfs patients. And happily I have a load of work on just that subject.
In your own time.
And while we wait for the M.E patient community to address the vicious abuse that its own leaders already acknowledge in private, I'm going to do my very best to live a great life, to enjoy my recovery and to dot the "i"s and cross the "t"s on my life's work of service for all people with M.E.
Basically I'm back. Thanks Professor.
