I’m Not Crazy!
“You look fine, and I can’t find anything wrong with you. Maybe you’re just depressed or stressed out.” Nearly all of my patients have heard this before. And they start to wonder: Am I really crazy? How could it all be in my mind? This chapter will summarize the small number of behavioral surveys that rheumatologists and psychiatrists have performed on fibromyalgia patients. The treatment of fibromyalgia will be reviewed in Parts VI and VII. Why are there so few studies that we can rely upon? First, most research is conducted at university medical centers, where fibromyalgia patients tend to be more symptomatic and have not responded to interventions by community physicians. Second, depression itself is associated with high rates of musculoskeletal pain. Also, few people have had comprehensive psychological evaluations before they became ill that can be used for comparison. Finally, instruments of psychological assessment were devised before we knew what fibromyalgia was, and popular tests such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) cannot distinguish between pain from a disease and pain from depression. Is fibromyalgia a manifestation of depression or the reverse? Well-designed studies have addressed this issue, but many used different methods, populations, ethnic groupings, referral sources, and geographical distributions. In any case, the results were reasonably similar. On average, these studies showed that about 18 percent of fibromyalgia patients have evidence of a major depression at any office visit and 58 percent have a history of major depression in their lifetime. What does this mean? At any point in time, the overwhelming majority of fibromyalgia patients are not seriously depressed. And if they are depressed, it’s usually because they do not feel well. This condition is called reactive depression and is reversible with treatment, as opposed to endogenous depression, which is caused by chemical imbalances and is much harder to treat. A well-designed study of depressed patients demonstrated that fewer than 10 percent had two or more tender points. Certain life events or historical factors are statistically present more often in fibromyalgia patients than in those without the disorder.