Thread by @HZiauddeen

🧵Long COVID, this tweet and these kinds of psychological approaches:

Long COVID is a multi-system condition with microvascular damage, immune dysregulation, clotting abnormalities and neuronal damage being amongst the mechanisms implicated.
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https://twitter.com/BPSOfficial/status/1437321421571694594

Sadly but unsurprisingly, it took too long for it to be taken it seriously and it still isn't being taken seriously enough. And like with everything else in COVID, there are plenty of prominent scientists who dismiss it as just a post-viral syndrome or 'psychosomatic'.
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There are clearly neuropsychiatric aspects to Long COVID (neurological, psychiatric and cognitive symptoms) and important psychological aspects (dealing with severe, chronic, disabling, life-altering illness). Both will require psychological research and treatment.
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On the other hand, any approaches that consider the causes of and risk factors for Long COVID as being primarily or largely psychological, are very problematic, as the primary assumptions and models are very poor/wrong.
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The information on this Campaign is very sparse but it seems to fall into this category.
This is from their information sheet:
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And this is what the expected outputs are. Based on these the assumptions seem to be that a certain set of psychological factors predict long COVID (no mention of severity of biological damage). These can be screened for and CBT approaches can be used to treat long COVID.
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Then there is:
'An information campaign to promote a biopsychosocial approach to long COVID to avoid the inevitable distress that can result from dualistic, biomedical reductionism.'

I think there are at least 3 far more important causes of inevitable distress.
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These are:
1. Suffering with a major multi-system condition with potential long-term consequences
2. People not believing/minimising point 1.
3. People not investigating, treating and researching the condition because it is thought to be psychological.
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Btw in the video Patrick Hill says that biomedical dualism would say that it's all psychological.

I think the biomedical view (isn't necessarily dualistic) would think of it as a complex multi-system disease.
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It is troubling that we have a new condition that is still being understood and people are already trying old treatments based on little mechanistic understanding.
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And I would be very wary of applying the Surawy model (CBT for chronic fatigue, which has been criticised) to Long COVID. There are several aspects of the syndrome that would be difficult to align with such a CB approach e.g. loss of sense of smell.
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I think there will be a major role for psychological approaches & treatments in helping people recover from Long COVID.
But I don't think these simplistic approaches will be helpful & worry they are dismissive and will be used to dismiss/minimise by govt, insurers, etc.
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