Brooks, Samantha K, Chalder, Trudie, Rimes, Katharine A · Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy · 2017 · DOI
This study looked at whether certain personality traits and thinking patterns might make someone more vulnerable to developing ME/CFS. Researchers compared 67 people with ME/CFS to 73 healthy people, asking about their personalities both now and before they became ill. They found that people who later developed ME/CFS tended to be perfectionists, were very self-sacrificing, and had unhelpful beliefs about emotions—especially before they got sick.
Understanding pre-illness personality and cognitive patterns may help identify people at risk for developing ME/CFS and could inform preventative strategies or early interventions. This research bridges the gap between psychological factors and disease onset, suggesting that addressing unhelpful thinking patterns and emotional beliefs might be relevant in CFS management.
This study does not prove that personality traits cause ME/CFS; it only shows these traits were more common before illness onset. The direction of causality remains unclear—stress and early illness symptoms may have influenced personality expression, rather than personality traits causing disease. Retrospective reporting introduces recall bias that could distort the accuracy of pre-illness characterizations.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
The first block is for the primary paper and is the citation you should use in research work. The atlas-snapshot line only applies if you are specifically referring to this atlas’s reading of the paper on the date shown.
Primary citation
Brooks, Samantha K, Chalder, Trudie, & Rimes, Katharine A (2017). Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Cognitive, Behavioural and Emotional Processing Vulnerability Factors.. Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352465816000631
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-brooks-2017-chronic-fatigue,
author = {Brooks, Samantha K and Chalder, Trudie and Rimes, Katharine A},
title = {Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Cognitive, Behavioural and Emotional Processing Vulnerability Factors.},
journal = {Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy},
year = {2017},
doi = {10.1017/S1352465816000631},
note = {PubMed: 28098051},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/brooks-2017-chronic-fatigue},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-29. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/brooks-2017-chronic-fatigue
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