Emma Hampson is a former therapist and a person with Severe M.E. who has had to retire due to ill health. She’s written a letter to the Editor of Therapy Today, and it was published in the Dec 2025 / January 2026 edition.
She explains why she was moved to respond to sections of an article they published in September 2025:
I was sorry to see that the brilliant letter Elisabeth Klaar wrote and had signed by so many highly respected ME professionals, in response to Lucy MacDonald’s article on chronic illness in the BACP magazine, was not printed. The reason being that they do not publish open letters.
At the same time as the open letter was sent in, I too submitted an individual letter about the article, which the editor responded to respectfully and positively, also commissioning me to write a longer article for the magazine.
After being given the opportunity to shorten my letter myself to the required word count, the editor then made very minor edits to edit it to their ‘house style’. But she also added one line: ‘I feel the article could have added more balance by giving voice to experiences like mine, of which there are many‘. I wish the editor had not added this line. With all the biomedical evidence for ME, and considering its political history, it should no longer be a matter of there being different sides to ME which deserve an equal voice, instead we should follow the science.
I hope to continue working on the longer article on ME and therapy as soon as I am able.
Emma Hampson’s letter
As someone with the contested illness ME I began reading The Silent Fight finally feeling that my and others’ lives were at long last being understood, destigmatised and given voice to. I was therefore unsettled midway through the piece when it slipped back into the territory linking trauma and the term ‘mind-body’ to chronic illness. The piece spotlights people with ME who recovered through practices and treatments based on the same beliefs as treatments recently removed from the NICE guidelines. It confused me to see what had begun as an article showing concern about the psychologisation of chronic illness to then switch to an interest in the psychologisation fo ME.
My confusion compounded when the piece warns therapists that ‘unconscious ableist beliefs often due to a lack of education, can harm clients even when subtly expressed’.
I was experiencing the very thing the article was warning against happening to me (as I read). The article interviewed two people who recovered from ME but none who hadn’t, even though the recovery rate is 5%-10%.
I wanted to just highlight how embedded the ableism can be that biases can show up even in pieces aiming to destigmatise. As someone who has experienced therapeutic trauma from having had my illness repeatedly disbelieved and psychologised, I feel that the article could have benefitted from including the latest biomedical research on ME, and more clearly emphasising the potential for harm caused by the brain-retraining programmes it names (Gupta, Curable). Personally I have willingly tried brain-retraining programmes as well as trauma-informed therapies, and I was made permamently worse by them. I feel the article could have added more balance by giving voice to experiences like mine, of which there are many. This compounded my experiences as a psychodynamic psychotherapist with ME, now too ill to practise, of the unchecked and unconscious bias that exists towards people with ME in therapy culture, a bias rooted in the political history of the illness, which I wish had been considered in the article.
Emma Hampson, MBACP
published in the Dec 2025 / Jan 2026 edition, Therapy Today
Thanks for the photo at the top of this page – by Pixel Shot on Unsplash
