Why can’t we get our minds around ME?

Do you ever wake up worried that you have tiny fibres growing beneath your skin, all along your spinal column? Possibly wriggling little fibres, placed there by the government or by aliens? By aliens I don’t mean asylum seekers but proper aliens, quite probably creatures with bifurcated tongues and scaly lips from the Planet Zog. If so, you may well consider yourself to be suffering from ‘Morgellons’.

This unfortunate condition had its heyday at the turn of the century, with hundreds of thousands of people reporting to their GPs and clinics in the USA and here, pleading to have these little fibres sorted out somehow. Millions and millions of dollars were spent investigating the medical causes of the supposed disease, which also had symptoms of lethargy, torpor, inability to sleep, aching joints and limbs, pain — remember these symptoms, please, they will come in handy later on in this article. Another symptom was a blind fury on the part of sufferers at any suggestion that their illness could be in any way psychiatric in origin.