Hold your excitement! Today, on the 14th June, we are present and LIVE at the Royal College of Psychiatrists International Congress in Liverpool to share a respectful leaflet and our open letter directly with delegates. This is ahead of tomorrow's Long Covid presentations by Paul Garner, Trudie Chalder and Alan Carson.

The response has been extraordinary. To date, the letter has received 1,200 individual signatories and the support of 58 organisations, including clinicians, researchers, patient advocates, and members of the public. This reflects a clear and growing call for scientific rigour, respectful discourse, and appropriate representation of evidence in discussions of IACC (infection-associated chronic conditions).

By Dr Elke Hausmann Audio available in Substack We are pleased to welcome the return of Dr Elke Hausmann as a guest writer. In this article she examines the controversial WIRED article which has sparked significant concern among patients and advocates for its portrayal of Long Covid, recovery narratives, and brain retraining approaches. What a headline. Ok, so generally journalists are not responsible for the headlines to their articles. But there are several tropes here, so

It is ME Awareness Day, and the publication of our open letter to the Royal College of Psychiatrists sits within a long and well-documented history of contested approaches to ME within psychiatry and adjacent services.

This article explores how cognitive therapies contribute to a dangerous medical paradigm for chronic illness. We shall focus on Paul, ‘he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy’, Garner’s opinion piece for the BMJ and his appearance at the SIRPA conference. We examine the historical, rhetorical, and systemic forces behind mind-body medicine and how they obscure harm through compassion-washing, concept laundering, and misplaced optimism.