Hareide, Live, Finset, Arnstein, Wyller, Vegard Bruun · Disability and rehabilitation · 2011 · DOI
This study asked nine young people with ME/CFS about how they understood their illness and how they coped with it. Rather than using questionnaires, researchers had detailed conversations with each person. The young people showed more varied ways of thinking about their illness and dealing with it than researchers expected—some focused on physical causes, others on multiple factors, and they used different coping strategies depending on the situation.
Understanding how young people with ME/CFS perceive and cope with their illness is essential for providing developmentally appropriate care. This study challenges assumptions that adolescents with ME/CFS think and respond uniformly, suggesting that personalized clinical approaches may be more effective than one-size-fits-all interventions.
This study does not establish causal relationships between beliefs, coping strategies, and disease outcomes. The small sample size (nine participants) and qualitative design mean findings may not represent all adolescents with ME/CFS, and no comparison group was used to determine whether these patterns differ from other chronic illnesses.
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
Hareide, Live, Finset, Arnstein, & Wyller, Vegard Bruun (2011). Chronic fatigue syndrome: a qualitative investigation of young patient's beliefs and coping strategies.. Disability and rehabilitation. https://doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2011.568663
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-hareide-2011-chronic-fatigue,
author = {Hareide, Live and Finset, Arnstein and Wyller, Vegard Bruun},
title = {Chronic fatigue syndrome: a qualitative investigation of young patient's beliefs and coping strategies.},
journal = {Disability and rehabilitation},
year = {2011},
doi = {10.3109/09638288.2011.568663},
note = {PubMed: 21473686},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/hareide-2011-chronic-fatigue},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-28. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/hareide-2011-chronic-fatigue
Contribute
Private, reviewed by a human. Not a public comment thread.