It’s 2025, but the abuse of people living myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) continues unabated. Already, less than a month into the New Year, a person living with severe ME – this time in Denmark – has reached out to the Canary with her appalling and urgent situation. Specifically, this is that her medical team is trying to forcefully detain her in hospital. Predictably, they are doing so after falsely labelling her severe and debilitating symptoms as psychiatric in origin.
In an heartbreakingly familiar story for severe ME patients worldwide, 26-year-old Line Langager Anderson faces the prospect of this involuntary hospitalisation permanently damaging her health. And there’s the very real and frightening possibility it could genuinely put her life at risk.
However, it hasn’t happened – yet. There’s still time to stop her medical providers from hospitalising her, but she needs people to act fast.
ME/CFS: another person with severe ME needs your solidarity
Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) is a debilitating condition often triggered by viruses. It can rival cancer and late-stage AIDS in severity.
Specifically, it’s a chronic systemic neuroimmune disease which affects nearly every system in the body. As a result, it causes a range of symptoms that hugely impact patients’ daily lives. These typically include influenza-like symptoms, cognitive impairment, multiple forms of pain, and heart, lung, blood pressure, and digestive dysfunctions, among other significantly debilitating symptoms.
In particular, post-exertional-malaise (PEM) is the hallmark feature of ME. This involves a disproportionate worsening of other symptoms after even minimal physical, social, mental, or emotional exertion.
At least 25% of people live with severe ME. In these cases, people living severe ME are mostly, if not entirely permanently bed-bound or hospitalised. On top of this, they are often unable to digest food, communicate, or process information and are fully dependent on others for their care.
Line Langager Anderson has lived with severe ME since April 2020. This was after a head and neck injury worsened her condition. She’s based in Denmark, and currently under the living at the care facility Arbejde Adlers Hus.
Psychiatrist hospitalisation threats
On her Facebook, Line has posted about her ongoing ordeal. Unsurprisingly, the current hospitalisation threats began when her medical providers brought psychiatrists into the mix. Predictably, these appear to have no formal training or understanding of severe ME and its common comorbidities.
In the first visit, she described how psychiatrists entered her respite care room without masking, and that:
They refused to go and repeated 30 times in a row that they will “MOTIVATE ME TO STOP MY MEDICATION” “DESPITE MY PAIN” AND TOLD ME TO STOP USING MY NECKNECK THAT KEEPS ME ALIVE AND GIVES ME FREE AIRWAY
Line likely has craniocervical instability (CCI) – which involves increased mobility at certain junctions in the neck. It’s a common co-occurring condition with ME.
However, she explained to the Canary that she has been unable to get a diagnosis in Denmark. Specifically, there are no specialists in the country who can diagnose or treat it. She told the Canary that:
My neck is incredibly unstable but I’ve been too sick to travel to Barcelona for imaging. We did speak with dr. Oliver about it and he was willing to do both diagnosis and surgery in one visit if I could manage fundraising and travelling. I have no-one to fundraise for me so I’m stuck in a country where not a single doctor acknowledges CCI. My neck collar helps me breathe freely and swallow— two things I can’t do well without wearing it.
Alongside this, they’re attempting to force Line to take the antipsychotic medication olanzapine – against her wishes. However, ME patients are often more susceptible to the side effects of antipsychotic medications like these. It means that they can actively harm their health further. And Line has pointed out, this could trigger a serious PEM crash from which she may not recover back to even her current dire baseline.
Worse still, they’re doing so while refusing her medication that Line knows helps her ME symptoms. She explained to the Canary that:
They intend to remove my pain relief and everything else that helps me, replacing it with antipsychotics, even though I am not psychotic and have actually been slowly improving over the past year at Arbejder Adler Hus. Psychiatry is dissatisfied with the slow pace, even though there is no cure for ME.
Psychologising her ME/CFS – an all too familiar story
Ultimately, the problem is that Line’s medical team aren’t actually treating her as a patient living with ME. Line said that the clinician overseeing her care:
even told me that she does not know how to manage ME (despite my having sent numerous useful, scientific articles). This fact alone should make the case clear: they are treating without professional competence.
Instead then, they’ve started psychologising her symptoms. Line shared some of the notes her doctors had made about her. Revealingly, they wrote that:
her condition can be aligned with psychosis, which requires treatment and threatens her health. She is informed about the type of medication, olanzapine, with a starting dose of 2.5 mg once daily, to be increased after three days to 5 mg once daily.
The expected effect is that the patient will become less sensitive to sensory stimuli that affect her functional level and reduce the degree of pain upon touch. This will help her gradually improve her basic daily functions. Improvement will be assessed when her functional level changes: eating, standing up, etc.
After a motivation period of 2–3 weeks, if the patient’s functional level is unchanged, hospitalization will be considered.
Moreover, from the start, her medical providers seemed to draw from the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of ME. For one, Line expressed how they’d already previously:
suggested electroconvulsive therapy and forced “rehabilitation” with GET [graded exercise therapy] and CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy].
Of course, as the Canary has repeatedly highlighted, GET has actively harmed countless ME patients. Meanwhile, doctors have long recommended CBT under the premise ME patients can “think themselves better”. Both are borne out of the BPS model that trivialises a physiological disease as psychological. It’s why the UK’s updated National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on ME have removed GET as a treatment, and downgraded CBT. Notably though, this was only after concerted campaigning from ME patients – many who’d experienced this firsthand – carers, and allies.
Controversial electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) isn’t an evidence-based treatment for ME either. The controversial process literally involves triggering small seizures in patient’s brains. If that sounds problematic, that’s because it very much is – the treatment can cause irreversible brain damage in patients. Psychiatrists sometimes refer patients with severe depression for the treatment. However, what’s significant is that there’s a long and disturbing history of clinicians forcing it on mental health patients, either without consent, or through coercive means.
None of that is to even mention the immense risk ECT poses to severe ME patients. While there’s little research into its impacts on people living with ME – an issue in itself – it’s plausible to imagine it could be extremely harmful.
People living with severe ME can sometimes experience seizures. Maltreatment of 24-year-old Carla Naoum in West Middlesex hospital has led to her condition progressively declining. Notably, healthcare staff removed door covers keeping the light out of her room, which seemed to trigger neurological symptoms presenting as tonic clonic seizures.
Therefore, there’s no telling how much damage actually physically inducing one might do.
What is clear is that there is no scientific basis for carrying out ECT on ME patients. At best, it’s medical negligence to prescribe a treatment without a body of sound scientific research on its impacts on a patient group. At worst, it’s unconscionable medical malpractice, profoundly unethical, and calls into question the professions’ claimed Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”.
And naturally, a dominant thinking in the medical profession that dismisses ME as psychological will also invariably mean that ECT will be foisted on some psychologised ME patients too.
And indeed it has. An article from the Cosmopolitan previously detailed this very experience for a young woman named Courtney in the US. It described how after nine rounds of ECT, she’d suffered permanent memory loss. Unsurprisingly, the treatment did nothing for her ME – if anything making it worse.
Essentially then, Line’s medical team has repeatedly tried to prescribe dangerous, non-evidence-based treatments. And we’ll be clear – forcing Line to undergo these would constitute serious and disgusting medical abuse.
Unfortunately, that has hardly been the end of it.
Putting her life at risk
Now, Line has been told she has two to three weeks to:
accept and try treatment with this medication. If I do not get out of bed during this period, they claim that I am unmotivated and a danger to my own health, thereby justifying forced hospitalization.
Of course, all the while, this ultimatum and psychiatry’s repeated visits threatening this, has been worsening her health too. Line has also detailed some of the effects the medical maltreatment has been having on her already.
On 16 January, she wrote how:
Psychiatry showed up again. Was forced to talk for ten minutes until my mouth started going paralyzed. Am crashed after their last visit and yet again left to myself without a side sitter.
I was clearly formulated how much improvement I have experienced on the medication that is recommended for ME. The fact that I process grief and anxiety immediately without hesitation and not being depressed.Yet I’m now put in limbo where a person has to come in EVERY day and offer me antipsychotic medication. If I say no, I can still be forced to be admitted.
I now have to accept that I’m going to be completely drugged and zombie-like from tonight. It’s the only way around their sick performances.
Moreover, as Line has herself harrowingly had to articulate, involuntary detention on a psychiatric ward could genuinely kill her. She expressed to the Canary that:
ME worsens with all forms of strain. What they intend to subject me to is so barbaric that the word torture is not sufficient. Where are our rights as severely ill patients in Denmark? This could kill me. That is not an exaggeration.
Tragically, she’s not wrong – it isn’t an exaggeration.
This is what happened to Sophia Mirza – the very first person to have ME/CFS recorded as her cause of death in the UK. It was after NHS doctors sectioned her under the Mental Health Act and incarcerated her in a mental health hospital without even basic nurse care. It caused her severe ME to worsen, and ultimately led to her death in 2005.
Other severe ME patients have died due to catastrophic hospital care failures too. The 2024 inquiry into the death of Maeve Boothby-O’Neill threw this into the spotlight.
Time to step up and stop this
Of course, the long-term and prevalent stigmatisation and psychologisation of ME has invariably led to healthcare systems across the globe forcefully hospitalising severe ME patients in this way. In short, it has long been going on – and healthcare systems the world over continue to neglect, abuse, and gaslight severe ME patients – with sometimes fatal consequences.
Within the ME community, anecdotal accounts of this experience abound. The Canary has covered numerous incidences of this in just the past year alone, such as Carla, and 26-year-old Katiana in Greece.
However, there’s been no attempt by states to understand the number of ME patients that public health systems have disastrously harmed like this.
At the end of the day, public health systems and governments don’t record this information. There’s therefore no reliable statistics available on how many severe ME patients healthcare professionals have wrongly detained in hospitals under harmful psychiatric pretences.
Now, Line’s involuntary hospitalisation is imminent – currently just a few weeks away if her doctors fail to listen to her. However, people in the online ME community have once again stepped up to stop this from happening.
A group has put together a letter to Line’s doctor to urge them to change course. They now need as many people as possible to sign it. You can add your name here.
Line told the Canary that the aim is to make sure:
the psych ward knows that all eyes are on their cruel treatment.
She expressed that:
I’m sure things will improve with enough voices speaking up for justice.
In other words, if enough people speak out, it could give pause to the medical team in Denmark. Crucially, the letter has highlighted a number of resources for Line’s medical team to engage with to inform themselves of the proper care she requires.
In October, the Canary wrote how:
Katiana cannot become the next Maeve.
Here we are again. Once more, Line must not become the next Maeve either – so it’s now vital that everyone who can speak out does so again.
Feature image supplied.
