Here's a Thought: Let's Psychologize Every Emerging Disease

Remember when AIDS was thought to be a psychiatric illness?

Even with the amount of medical technology available today, doctors frequently diagnose illnesses without knowing what’s causing them. Ever had a sore throat, cough, runny nose, and slight fever? Have you ever been told you have a “bug,” even by medical personnel, and prescribed an antibiotic “just in case” it’s a bacterial infection? Even pneumonia is not generally diagnosed outside the hospital as being caused by a virus or bacterium, and “stomach flu”? Forget about it—unless you have a severe case of food poisoning, it’s unlikely you’ll ever know what caused your illness and your doctor, frankly, couldn’t care less as long as it goes away.

But when the medical profession decides on a cause of an illness, it becomes incontrovertible dogma. Any physician or other health care professional who doubts it is generally considered to be a crackpot who’s not delivering the proper standard of care. Physicians can lose their licenses for ignoring medicine’s conventional wisdom; recently, for example, physicians have lost their licenses for dispensing “Covid misinformation.” (1)

What happens when a physician or researcher finds hard evidence that the wrong cause is being blamed for a serious disease? How hard is it to reverse medical dogma?

One now-famous case of a physician-researcher who went to great lengths to reverse conventional wisdom is the Australian doctor who discovered that ulcers and stomach cancer, long believed to be caused by stress, are actually caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. Internist Barry Marshall, working with pathologist Robin Warren, were so certain of their discovery and so tired of being told they were wrong that in 1981, Marshall swallowed a bottle of water laced with H. pylori. Within days, he developed gastritis, became increasingly ill, and had his own gut biopsied. The culprit was H. pylori, and in 2005, Marshall and Warren shared a Nobel Prize for their paradigm-busting discovery. (2)

Another of the more astonishing diagnostic missteps in modern medicine is the early theory that AIDS was a psychological disease.

In 1984, when 50% of AIDS patients didn’t survive, New York psychoanalyst Casper G. Schmidt published a paper titled “The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS.” (3)

“Schmidt believed that AIDS was a psychosomatic disease—that it was caused by an outbreak of 'mass hysteria,' and that AIDS patients were, in some sense, thinking themselves ill,” a Discover Magazine columnist writing under the name of Neuroskeptic recounted in early 2021. (3)

According to Schmidt, the trigger for AIDS was the rise of right-wing
ideology in America following Ronald Reagan's election as President
in 1980. Newly aggressive conservative Christians, in their reactionary
attacks on gay rights, created an unconscious psychodrama in which
gay men were cast as shameful and tainted.

Homosexuals internalized this anti-gay narrative and "essentially turned
their aggression inward (by somatizing tensions) and played the role of
the masochistic partner in the scapegoating ritual which was to follow."
In the face of the guilt and shame heaped upon them by the New Right,
gay men "turned in against themselves, causing a wave of shame- and guilt-
induced depression."

According to Schmidt, gay men became depressed after 1980 and this
depression was the cause of AIDS. This is the claim that makes Schmidt's
paper so remarkable. ... Schmidt claimed that the type of immune suppres-
sion seen in AIDS is also present in cases of severe depression. He gives
no details of this, saying that a companion paper was soon to follow with
details on how depression leads to AIDS, but this was never published. (3)

By 1983, National Cancer Institute researcher Robert C. Gallo had gone a long way toward convincing the world that a new virus he claimed to have isolated—originally named HTLV-3, soon renamed Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV—was the sole cause of AIDS. (4)

And in April 1984, Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler, alongside Gallo, held a press conference to announce the development of a blood test for the new “AIDS virus,” also promising quick development of a vaccine. (4)

And while HIV conventional wisdom is accepted by every clinician treating AIDS patients, many questions remain about how the putative cause actually does its damage—if it does any damage at all.

Psychosomatic illnesses—when a mental illness causes a physical symptom—were all the rage in 1984 when a new, disabling disease broke out in Incline Village, Nevada. It struck heterosexual men and women—although it quickly became denigrated as a disease of hysterical, well-off women—and like AIDS, it caused immunodeficiency. Also, like AIDS, it was almost immediately characterized as a psychological disease.

The leading proponent of the psychological theory about this heterosexual version of immune deficiency was Dr. Stephen E. Straus at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The late Dr. Straus’s boss—who never repudiated Straus’s theory or, as far as we know, suggested Straus pursue a different line of research—was the recently retired director of NIAID, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.

The new heterosexual illness was first known as “Chronic Epstein-Barr Virus Syndrome” because of its apparent association with the Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), but it was later named “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)” by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). To the dismay of patients and many of their physicians, that name stuck.                                                 

Straus and his colleagues never gave up on proving that CFS—now often referred to as ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)—was primarily a psychiatric disease.

In December 1988, Straus and colleagues published a paper that stated, “Our findings are reminiscent of data showing that psychological factors contribute to one’s vulnerability to delayed recovery from acute infections and are in accord with recent findings that a history of affective disorders [psychiatric conditions] is frequent among patients with the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” (5)

In the same report, Straus described ME/CFS as a form of depression.

“Ultimately, any hypothesis regarding the cause of the chronic fatigue syndrome must incorporate the psychopathology that accompanies and in some cases, precedes it,” Straus and colleagues wrote. (5)

Psychiatric disorders are responsible for ME/CFS patients’ perceptions of the severity of their illness, according to Straus and co-workers:

Although we could not identify a reliable laboratory marker of disease 
severity, we did find an association between the results of psychological 
tests and patients’ sense of well-being. Significant improvement in levels 
of anger, depression, and other mood states correlated with overall clinical 
improvement. These results indicate that affect [psychology] plays an important part in the perception of illness severity in the chronic fatigue syndrome. (5)

Straus’s continued assertions that ME/CFS “represents a psychoneurotic condition” are inexplicable, particularly in light of some of the biological results that he and his colleagues reported. In one study, participants had “higher geometric mean titers of antibodies to cytomegalovirus than age- and sex-matched controls”; three patients displayed anti-nuclear antibodies (indicative of possible autoimmune disease) and one exhibited a “low-positive titer of rheumatoid factor” (indicative of possible rheumatoid arthritis). Ten of 73 blood samples from study patients showed elevated levels of the immune system modulator interferon; and levels of an interferon-induced enzyme, “reflecting the activation of some immune pathways” were “higher in patients than in controls” in this 1988 study. (6)

Straus clearly had an adversarial relationship with his study subjects. In another article, he wrote that “It is difficult and at times unpleasant to address the demands of such [chronic fatigue syndrome] patients or to test hypotheses as to the etiology of their woes.” (7)

The difficulty of it all was expressed again in a December 1988 report: “The chronic fatigue syndrome remains a difficult and controversial entity. ... Studies of its pathogenesis and treatment are difficult. ... Despite these obstacles...” (5)

Ironically, it was Straus and colleagues who discovered in 1989 that ME/CFS patients, like AIDS patients, have extremely low CD4 (T-4) cell levels, a serious immune system defect. (8)

Most healthy people have CD4 cell counts of about 1000. In AIDS, CD4 cell counts can fall precipitously; below 200, an AIDS patient is considered to be in danger of developing a potentially life-threatening opportunistic infection. (9)

By 1993, Straus and his colleagues had found that CFS patients had “significantly decreased” numbers of a subtype of CD4 cells. (10)

In a government press release, however, Straus emphasized that the loss of CD4 cells in CFS patients was completely different from the loss of CD4 cells in AIDS patients. (9)

“This decrease does not indicate the CD4 T-cells [T4 cells] are being destroyed, such as happens in AIDS,” Straus commented in the press release, “but that more CD4 T-cells appear to change location, shifting from the blood into the tissues. These tissue-based cells escape detection by research blood tests.” (10)

A careful reading of Straus and colleagues’ actual research report, however, reveals that this assertion—that the CD4 cells have changed location from the blood into lymph node tissues—was based on absolutely no data. It was just a guess. All that Straus and his co-workers showed was a significant decrease in CD4 cells in CFS patients. (10)

Not long after Straus’s research report was published, another paper suggested that AIDS patients’ CD4 cell counts were not really as low as they appeared to be because AIDS patients’ CD4 cells were also hiding in the lymph nodes. (9)

No one in the lay press appeared to notice these parallel explanations of what was happening to the CD4 cells of AIDS and CFS patients.

Straus’s finding about the CD4 cells of CFS patients is particularly important because of his attempts to prove that CFS was a psychiatric disorder. Discovering this “abnormality of immune regulation” in CFS patients, as he and his coworkers called it in their paper published in the Journal of Clinical Immunology, did not discourage Straus from pursuing his hypothesis about CFS being a psychological disease. He and his colleagues suggested that “The [immunologic] abnormalities may be secondary to an underlying neuropsychiatric disorder which affects immune function indirectly...”

In other words, depression—or another “underlying neuropsychiatric disorder”—causes immune dysfunction.

Meanwhile, studies documenting the immune system abnormalities found in CFS patients—like non-functional natural killer (NK) cells, for instance—suggested that CFS, like AIDS, is primarily an immunological, not a psychological, illness. (8-10)

What are we to conclude from all of this error—to be kind—or outright misdirection, as it seems to be?

First, illnesses not understood by the medical profession are all-too-easily slipped into the “psychoneurotic” or “psychosomatic” bag of tricks.

Second, AIDS and ME/CFS—to almost everyone’s dismay—have so much in common, including being misdiagnosed as psychiatric illnesses, that the true cause of both should be seriously investigated. Now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.     Julia Marnin. “Doctor Loses License, Must Have Psych Evaluation for Covid Falsehoods, Board Say.” Miami Herald, January 18, 2024.
2.     Pamela Weintraub. “The Doctor Who Drank Infectious Broth, Gave Himself an Ulcer, and Solved a Medical Mystery. The medical elite thought they knew what caused ulcers and stomach cancer. But they were wrong—and didn’t want to hear otherwise.” Discover Magazine, April 8, 2010.
3.     Neuroskeptic. “The Man Who Thought Aids was All in the Mind: I look at one of the most remarkable articles in the history of psychology.” Discover Magazine, February 13, 2021. https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-man-who-thought-aids-was-all-in-the-mind
4.     “HIV Turns 30 Today: American scientists announced the discovery of the virus behind AIDS in 1984.” April 23, 2014, ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/hiv-turns-30-today/story?id=23439218
5.     Stephen E. Straus, et al.; “Acyclovir Treatment of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”; New England Journal of Medicine, December 29, 1988; p.1692.
6.     Stephen E. Straus; “The Chronic Mononucleosis Syndrome”; Journal of Infectious Diseases, 1988; 157:405.
7.     Stephen E. Straus et al.; “Allergy and the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”; Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, May 1988, 81:791.
8.     Neenyah Ostrom. “January 23, 1989: The Straus Strategy Emerges.” Chapter 10 in America’s Biggest Coverup: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic and Its Link to AIDS. 2021. First published by TNM Inc., 1993.
9.     Neenyah Ostrom. “In CFS Patients, as in AIDS, T4 Cells May Be Sequestered in Lymph Nodes.” Chapter 39 in America’s Biggest Coverup: 50 More Things Everyone Should Know about the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic and Its Link to AIDS. 2021. First published by TNM Inc., 1993.
10.  Straus, Stephen E. et al.; “Lymphocyte Phenotype and Function in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”; Journal of Clinical Immunology 13(1):30, 1993.