Identifying as Having Contracted COVID-19?

I disagree strongly with some of the things in Jeremy Devine’s Wall Street Journal op-ed but I wanted to highlight one observation of his that I found interesting:

The concept of long Covid has a highly unorthodox origin: online surveys produced by Body Politic, which launched in 2018 and describes itself atop its website’s homepage as “a queer feminist wellness collective merging the personal and the political.” In March 2020, the group’s co-founders created the Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group, and as part of their mission of “cultivating patient led research,” the organization coordinated a series of online surveys on persistent symptoms. Based on the results of these, Body Politic produced the first report on long Covid in May.

But many of the survey respondents who attributed their symptoms to the aftermath of a Covid-19 infection likely never had the virus in the first place. Of those who self-identified as having persistent symptoms attributed to Covid and responded to the first survey, not even a quarter had tested positive for the virus. Nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.

I find the prospect that we are taking seriously the claims of people that they’ve had the disease without actual material evidence distressing. Who are we to doubt lived experience? If that notion catches hold entire fields of inquiry might as well be tossed in the dustbin.

Where I disagree with him is his suggestion that diseases for which there is no clinical test are psychosomatic in nature and should be treated as psychological disorders rather than as diseases. There is an enormous array of diseases that have no definitive clinical tests but which we’re pretty sure have physical causes. These include Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. Maybe I’m being unkind but I attribute that to his specialty. Just as surgeons tend to look for surgical solutions to health problems so are psychiatrists tempted to view anything for which no definitive test exists as requiring psychiatric treatment.