A "Chronic Complainer's" Guide to the Hystericizing of Fibromyalgia

Abstract

In the early 2000s, a study set out to test the popular belief that fibromyalgia is “factitiously driven by misinformed media reports and an overly liberal disability compensation system” (White & Thompson 2003). Although the authors disproved this hypothesis, their findings nonetheless provoked a series of editorials that reinscribed these suspicions and were published alongside the original study in the Journal of Rheumatology. Working within feminist disability studies and using discourse analysis as a method, I examine how these editorials engage in what Anna Mollow (2014) identifies as the routine hystericization of conditions with medically unexplained symptoms. I argue that these texts mobilize an all-too common narrative of “secondary gain” whereby patients, particularly women, are cast as “chronic complainers” and suspected of feigning or exaggerating illness for some interpersonal or economic advantage. I position these representations within a longer genealogical continuum of poorly understood conditions historically framed as psychosomatic to demonstrate how these editorials recycle and repackage gendered characterizations of nineteenth century nervous disorders and apply them to their (mis)representation of fibromyalgia. By framing fibromyalgia in this way, the authors perpetuate harmful narratives that I argue contribute to the oppression of those of us with misunderstood and invisibilized illnesses. Drawing on principles of disability justice, I extend this analysis by situating these suspicions toward feminized and unverifiable illness within a broader moral economy that ties human worth to value-laden notions of citizenship, productivity, and independence. In this schema, those perceived as “unproductive” members of society with no “legitimate” claim to illness are positioned as unworthy burdens on the healthcare system and undeserving of social supports. I argue that these pejorative framings reproduce eugenic logics that construct dependency as a social and economic threat, obscuring the fundamentally interdependent nature of human life and legitimizing the restriction of care and support to those deemed undeserving. Ultimately, this dissertation traces how skepticism toward fibromyalgia is embedded in broader historical narratives and cultural ideologies that continue to shape access to care, structuring whose pain is believed, whose suffering is recognized as worthy of care, and which lives are valued and sustained.