Why Regarding Unknown Illnesses As "Mental Disease" Is Offensive

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since most people take modern medicine as "absolute" (by saying that I mean, people believe modern medicine can take care of all physical illnesses, except fatal diseases like cancer), they easily consider the cause of unknown illnesses as "mental". This is why we often see people try to "encourage" those who suffer invisible diseases to work "harder", to push through, as if they are mentally weak individuals. I still remember once a kind lady's first words to me after hearing my brief story: " be tough." I have to say, not only this is a wrong approach, but also offensive attitude toward those patients. Why, because one of primary reasons these people got so sick is precisely because they are mentally tough - so tough that they overdrew their energy, and their illnesses are nothing but the consequence of their mental toughness (physical energy overdrawn).

Body pain and depression

Here is a story about "Body pain and depression" :
One day one of my friends who suffers depression told me that she woke up with body pain --- "a typical sign of depression". I didn't pay much attention until one morning I myself woke up with body pain. And later I realized that I had this synptome longtime ago and the reason for that was my bed, not depression! Here is why: during winter, the cold air would invade into your body if you don't put enough pads on top of your bed (not on top of you body). This is actually a common sense in China since Chinese people didn't have heater during winter. So, the second night I just put extra blanks on my bed and you know what? Body pain was gone! So I told my friend and she did the same thing and enjoyed the same positive outcome.
The reason I share this story is: a lot of times when people suffer from unknow diseases, they would be easily told that it was due to their mental issues, but I believe the truth is, in the cases like chronic fatigue syndrome, physical problems usually play a bigger role.