Agreed - "in your head" doesn't mean what most people think it means, and is somewhat of a pejorative term. Such a disease is not really addressed by the psych

Agreed - "in your head" doesn't mean what most people think it means, and is somewhat of a pejorative term. Such a disease is not really addressed by the psychiatric community at all, which disavows that the mind can have such a powerful effect on the body as to cause gross organic conditions like chronic pain (e.g. fibromyalgia), CFS, etc. However, there is nowhere else for the author of this article to point for ongoing research, most of which was abandoned in the 1960s. Such an ailment is not supposed to originate from the conscious mind at all, but from the unconscious, so: 1. The effects of the disease aren't in your head at all, they are very real, and 2. The cause happens to be in the brain rather than some other organ of the body, but it is not available to the conscious, thinking mind. That doesn't mean that we should stop researching non-psychogenic causes for common ailments, as has been mentioned, ulcers and even some forms of CFS have been shown to have a clear cause and treatment. However, it seems a shame that this entire line of research has pretty much been abandoned...what happened, after all, to the hysterical diseases that Freud was successfully addressing in the early part of the last century? I doubt very much that they just stopped occurring.