Oh... so you actually think that mental health problems aren't organic.

Nope, but I obviously had a terminological problem (you're the MD here, not me). I was operating under the assumption that "organic disease process" implied that there was no determinant psychological causation. Obviously all changes in the human body will be physical in nature (tautological); people are just matter in motion, after all. Both clinical depression and MS consist of physiological changes in the body. My contention is that ME is a disease like MS (probably autoimmune, with predisposing genetic factors and a pathogenic trigger) and not psychogenic like clinical depression.

However think for a moment why having a mental health problem being the cause of your symptoms is so abhorrent to you. Then realize that the same negative associations you have about people with mental health problems are not only wrong but are prejudiced toward people with mental health conditions.

Wow, you are really the prejudiced one here: you just made an unfair prejudgment about me! I suffered a 10 month bout of clinical depression during my freshman and sophomore years in college: I had anhedonia, avolition, the works. I recognized it as such, went to campus counseling, took antidepressants, and after 3/4 of a year came out the other side. And before I graduated I was actually part of a campus group which sought to raise awareness for mental health issues and the importance of seeking treatment for them. I have no problem telling people that I had a mental health condition in the past (I mentioned it during a job interview once, which was probably a bad idea), and I had no problem at the time taking medication to treat this mental health condition. And if running (or perhaps crawling) down the street shouting "I'm crazy! I'm crazy!" would have cured me of CFS (which has drastically different symptoms than depression does), then damn it I would have done that.

Unfortunately, CFS/ME is in no way like clinical depression: depression doesn't cause your lymph nodes to swell for 3 years running, cause you to lose your higher level verbal understanding and reasoning facilities (I could still read and understand Kierkegaard and Hegel when I had depression; not so with CFS/ME), doesn't cause you to lose processing speed on standardized tests, especially math sections and areas testing PIQ, doesn't cause your body to cannibalize all of the muscle that you had built when you collapse and against your will sleep for 6 hours after returning from the gym, doesn't cause you to become sick and incapacitated for a week with a combination of a hangover/the flu after lifting weights for 15 minutes (I could still exercise easily with depression), doesn't cause you to feel like you are knocked over and incapable of moving due to sickness the next day if you drink one beer, doesn't cause you to fail to remember people's faces when you see them outside of class, 3 days after class ended, and you had sat next to them and talked with them for the entire semester. If people with depression can't get out of bed it's because they are lacking in higher level executive functions due to their condition; they could get up if they wanted to, but they have been robbed of their volition and are in want of wants. People with CFS/ME want desperately to get out of bed, but can't because they are crushed by the same feeling that you would have when sick and tired with the flu, just 1000X greater, to the point where they are incapable of motion for hours on end, cannot open their eyes or speak, cannot work despite the fact that they yearn to, and become deadweights for their spouses, children, and extended families, who in many cases will eventually abandon them. And for a significant portion of sufferers, this condition, a fire for life entombed in a broken sepulcher, this hell which no loving, all powerful and all knowing god would ever make for his children lest he were a lie, will last forever.

So I've had CFS and I've had depression. And while CFS might or might not have psychological causes, it is certainly not depression.

But I have an honest question for you. You say that CFS is a disabling mental health issue and use that to explain the physiological abnormalities which a burgeoning snowball of studies have found in patients. I say that CFS is a disabling disease process bereft of causative psychological factors (not a mental health condition). Ok, fine, we disagree. But even looking at this with your assumption that CFS is a mental health issue, there would still be no reason to fail to research the changes it effects upon the body and how it develops. After all, we do that for depression, don't we (and CFS is arguably much more destructive to the lives of those suffering with it than depression is, as I'd know as someone who has had both). And the best evidence we have on CFS so far indicates things like autoimmune abnormalities, problems with ATP production, etc... are involved in it (unless you are going to disbelieve studies because you don't want them to be true). The evidence is admittedly raw, but it is there, and begs for more research. So even if you say that CFS is a mental health issue, would you support following the evidence and researching things like the autoimmune effects of this condition in the hope of developing treatments to reverse some of its disabling symptoms?

Would you support or be willing to donate to something like this, for instance?. After all, most CFS cases start after a pathogenic infection, and there is some reason to suspect that certain pathogens could contribute to the development of certain mental health disorders.

Or perhaps support more studies like this one, where two Norwegian researchers accidentally found that they could drastically improve the functionality of about 2/3 of CFS patients by knocking out their B-cells? (They are currently doing a larger study that's methodologically stronger, as their initial results were accidental).

Or to expand this one, which found neuroinflammation in the brains of CFS patients?

The important thing is ultimately not whether or not the condition we are researching is a mental health condition, but simply that we are researching it and doing so by following the best evidence we have regarding its causes and effects, as the more we understand about this condition the more likely we are to help those afflicted with it, to correct some of physiological abnormalities which we have reason to suspect it engenders, and hopefully to ultimately cure it when it appears.

So given that you contend that CFS is a mental health problem, would you still be willing to support medical research into it and as a good empiricist to follow the best evidence we have regarding it, as we do for mental health conditions like schizophrenia?

Just curious.