I think you're reading more into this study than the study itself says. "Conclusions: Our study shows higher levels of neuroticism in patients with post-COVID

I think you're reading more into this study than the study itself says. "Conclusions: Our study shows higher levels of neuroticism in patients with post-COVID syndrome" does not imply that "long COVID ... is likely psychiatric." I'm an engineer, not a social scientist, but to my eye this study doesn't determine the direction of causality. It certainly seems plausible to me that a chronic illness could cause the neuroticism they measured, rather than vice-versa. Further, the authors themselves seem to imply that there are non-psychiatric symptoms of long COVID: "Secondly, we evaluated the correlation between the main personality traits and the neuropsychiatric features of post-COVID syndrome" suggests that there may be non-neuropsychiatric features. I think that, as unsatisfying as the prospect is, it's just going to take more time and work for humanity to really understand this virus -- including the nature of long COVID. As an aside, this article from 2019 [0] suggests that ME is not (or at least not purely) a psychiatric illness. "The US Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2015 conducted an extensive review of the literature, including expert testimonies from the most prominent US ME/CFS experts and concluded that ME/CFS is a ‘serious biological illness’. Similarly, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded that ME/CFS is ‘not a primary psychological disease’ (Green et al., 2015)." [0] [0] Geraghty et al., "The ‘cognitive behavioural model’ of chronic fatigue syndrome: Critique of a flawed model." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6482658/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6482658/