"Real Delusions of an Unreal Disease: A History of Morgellons"

"Disease has always had a hierarchy. To suffer from a rare disorder that has been definitively traced to a biological origin is preferable to being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. One patient suffers heroically, the other is simply insane. That’s likely why Leitao didn’t just want Morgellons recognized as a disease, but rather a disease with a biological origin—a disease like Lyme’s Disease caused by an infectious agent...

Recent decades have shown an incredible rise of illness without obvious cause. More than 10 million Americans had been—and continue to be—diagnosed with syndromes with no medically known origin, like chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and post-polio syndrome. These syndromes have all challenged what researchers know about physical pain, both its origins and its relationship to mind and body. In these diagnoses is a persistent reminder that pain is often perception that has to be communicated in order to made real—and that the language of pain is fragmentary, abstract, often not up to the task. Even disorders that are widely thought to be psychological in origin—multiple chemical sensitivity, premenstrual dysphoria—can have devastatingly painful effects...

Study after study confirms that women’s pain is rarely taken seriously, history has coded pain as a psychological rather than a physical problem. For centuries women’s pain was dismissed as a fundamental flaw in their biology, the result of a failing delicate nature. Packed off to dingy asylums across the United States and Europe, women in pain were labelled hysterical. And hysteria itself was coded beyond gender—to be nervous was to be frail, to be over civilized, to be affected by modernity. It was a language of pain that was historically denied to women of color. History holds that white women were frail and delicate, women of color were hardy and fertile. It’s no surprise then that the vast majority of Morgellons suffers were white women like Joni Mitchell."
http://jezebel.com/real-delusions-of-an-unreal-disease-a-history-of-morge-1696912437?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

This is a fascinating reflection on a disease and pain and cultural acceptance of diseases, and how important that is for the development of treatments.

And this can be generalized to wider failures to respect each others' pain.