Horton-Salway, M · Journal of health psychology · 2001 · DOI
This study examined how people with ME/CFS talk about their illness and explain what caused it. Researchers found that patients often describe working too hard before getting sick, but in doing so, they unintentionally suggest they might have caused their own illness—even while trying to prove ME is a real physical disease. The study shows how the words people choose and stories they tell can have complicated effects on how others understand their condition.
This research highlights a critical communication challenge that ME/CFS patients face: the difficulty of explaining their illness in ways that establish legitimacy without inadvertently reinforcing harmful stereotypes. Understanding these narrative dynamics can help patients, clinicians, and researchers recognize how language shapes perceptions of ME/CFS etiology and may inform more effective public communication about the disease.
This study does not establish the actual causes of ME/CFS or test whether overwork genuinely contributes to disease onset. It does not measure outcomes or compare patient health between groups. Rather, it analyzes discourse patterns and does not prove that the narrative strategies patients use reflect actual causal mechanisms of illness.
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
Horton-Salway, M (2001). Narrative Identities and the Management of Personal Accountability in Talk about ME: A Discursive Psychology Approach to Illness Narrative.. Journal of health psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/135910530100600210
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-horton-salway-2001-narrative-identities,
author = {Horton-Salway, M},
title = {Narrative Identities and the Management of Personal Accountability in Talk about ME: A Discursive Psychology Approach to Illness Narrative.},
journal = {Journal of health psychology},
year = {2001},
doi = {10.1177/135910530100600210},
note = {PubMed: 22049326},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/horton-salway-2001-narrative-identities},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-29. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/horton-salway-2001-narrative-identities
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