Sam Bungey

Well, we spoke to, because later on in the series, we kind of go into the history of psychogenic illnesses and...

how that happens.

And there's a guy, I mean, they call it functional illness now is the sort of more PC term, but there's a guy who works in Edinburgh and Edinburgh University.

And he says that actually, and several of them didn't want to talk about long COVID because to them, they see that as potentially another example of this, but they say that it's just really fascinating.

There's an Irish neurologist, actually, we also interview called Dr. Susanna Sullivan,

And they talk about how the biggest thing that starts something is, I don't know what the word would be, like genuine or legitimate or an illness that you can name and put your finger on initially.

And then people kind of get stuck.

in that mode and they find it really hard to become unstuck.

So often people have had COVID and then it's just become this other thing and you can't see the join.

It doesn't mean that none of it's real and you're not really experiencing all of those symptoms.

It's just that it's probably started with this thing and then kind of morphed into this other thing that they would call a functional disease.

It's fascinating.

But they didn't want to talk about it because none of them wanted to talk about long COVID because they were like, it's too, it's a minefield.

You keep talking about that and more people get it.

Like, is that it?

Yeah, or they just, it's hard because of the stigma around it.

So anytime they weigh into the other debates like ME,

other people say, you're saying that we're faking, that we're pretending and it's insensitive and offensive and et cetera, et cetera.

So often they don't even want to, they don't want to talk about these things because of the stigma around them, but they feel like not talking about them means that nobody gets anywhere with them.

Of course, you very much beat us to the story.