Doctors who don't know what they're seeing find all sorts of ways to blame the patient for her symptoms.
When I was married, the doctor's conclusion was that all my symptoms could be attributed to "you resent your husband making you work". (Do I look that dumb that I would consent to marrying someone who told me I needed to support him till he graduated, if I were looking for a husband who would let me quit work?!) Didn't matter to him that I said the symptoms started before we got married, they got worse after we got married, and that was proof enough for him.
Now that I'm divorced, I was told that all my symptoms were a result of being depressed over the divorce. The symptoms were there while I was married, but this doctor chose to ignore that inconvenient fact.
A friend who has never been married (by choice) was told that her symptoms were because she was unhappy that she was unmarried.
Married, single or divorced, they're sure your CFS is solely caused by your marital status.
If you have a job, they blame the symptoms on stress. If you don't have a job, they decree that you are faking these symptoms so you don't have to go back to work. If you lost your job because of worsening symptoms, they turn this around in their heads and conclude that your symptoms started when you got depressed about losing your job for reasons unrelated to your health.
If you exercise regularly, you're just fatigued from over-exercising. If you don't, then the problem is deconditioning. If you stopped exercising because it made your symptoms worse, they conclude that you got worse because you stopped exercising. A doctor who doesn't know much about CFS knows only that exercise produces a feel-good effect in most people and tells you to exercise and improve your mood. A doctor who does know about CFS knows that you're telling the truth, that you had no choice, you had to stop exercising because it was unduly exhausting.
I used to walk 20-25 miles a day on weekends. Suddenly, I could barely make it the 10 feet to the bathroom, and needed to rest on the floor for half an hour before I could make it the 10 feet back to the bed. There is no question that having that little stamina is abnormal, and especially for someone with my athletic history. The doctor concluded that this was just one more bit of creative embellishment to get my way. It was too bizarre to be true.
"Too bizarre", except in the minds of CFS experts, who've heard not only that, but also reports of being unable to comprehend written or spoken English, and seen for themselves patients struggling to find the right word when speaking.
The layman who looked after me during the initial virus naively called it "brain fever", and, in the long run, it appears his assessment was more accurate than some of the doctors'. Research has shown viral damage and lesions in the brain, and all the symptoms can be attributed to a dysfunction of the central nervous system.
Which has nothing to do with whether you're married, single or divorced, or whether you work or not.
It's not the patients who need psychological help to overcome the symptoms, it's the doctors who put the blame on patients rather than listening to ALL the facts. It was obvious from the comments of several of my doctors that the real problem was that they have a very low opinion of women, and had not yet moved their thinking into the 20th Century, not even when the rest of us were already into the 21st.
All that mattered to them was their opinion that "all women want to be housewives" and not the facts being presented that this woman had started her own business as a high school student, this woman had worked for years, this woman was a successful careerwoman -- not even the fact that the problems started with a severe virus and were still accompanied by flu-like symptoms.
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