The biopolitics of CFS/ME, by Nikos Karfakis, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences [Available online 8 June 2018]

Highlights:

• The diagnosis of CFS/ME is not only a scientific issue nor only contested within the confines of the clinic, but a much broader, biopolitical problem.
• Attempts at making CFS/ME a stable epistemic object, have so far been only partially successful.
• CFS/ME advocacy groups have been increasingly active internationally, making various demands on the scientific establishment and the governments.

Abstract:

This paper argues that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) constitutes a biopolitical problem, a scientific object which needs to be studied, classified and regulated.

Assemblages of authorities, knowledges and techniques make CFS/ME subjects and shape their everyday conduct in an attempt to increase their supposed autonomy, wellbeing and health. CFS and CFS/ME identities are however made not only through government, scientific, and medical interventions but also by the patients themselves, a biosocial community who collaborates with scientists, educates itself about the intricacies of biomedicine, and contests psychiatric truth claims.

CFS/ME is an illness trapped between medicine and psychology, an illness that is open
to debate and therefore difficult to manage and standardise. The paper delineates different interventions by medicine, science, the state and the patients themselves and concludes that CFS/ME remains elusive, only partially standardised, in an on-going battle between all the different actors that want to define it for their own situated interests.