Supported exercise and antidepressants would do wonders for a lot of the boilerplate POTS/EDS/GP chronic influencers. But you can't grift or get to play the sick role if you actually try to get better.
This is a problem with "support groups", even for those with real illnesses. The dynamics of those places end up with a really perverse incentive to never recover.
Let's say it's a Facebook group for sufferers of African Bum Disease (the most dreaded illness amongst British 8-year-olds in the 1980s, largely spread by being "it"). African Bum Disease is incurable, but you can learn to live with it by making lifestyle changes and the right mental conditioning. So you have people who are stuck at home with horribly diseased bums, but they get to meet other sufferers (and the odd grifter pretending to have it) in this group and find a sense of community, people just like them. For many, these are their only friends, or at least they are the only friends who truly understand them and their lives.
So if you learn to cope with African Bum Disease, you no longer need the group. So you leave and lose all your friends. So it's better to stay in the group. It gets worse, though. There will be a large cohort of people who do recover, and leave the group. Those who can cope, and could advise others on how to cope, are no longer there. The people who are left, then, are those who are struggling. And the grifters who want to look as sick as possible. All these people give each other terrible advice that keeps them sick, and keeps them in the group. The very dynamic of the group is to skim off the people who could help others the most, and to concentrate and refine sickness and hopelessness.
The people who stay in the group the longest, and are the most prominent posters, are the ones who become admins or at least become leaders on a social level. And, given that staying in the group rewards failure to recover, these people are the biggest headcases who can't cope with their disease at all - and now they're the ones setting the rules. They have a HUGE incentive to not only play up how difficult it is to recover, but to actively prevent others from recovering. So when someone says that African Bum Disease can be mitigated by diet, exercise and a healthy mental attitude, those people are banned for "downplaying the seriousness of the illness". No, you see, African Bum Disease means that you can't work and need a power chair and a feeding tube and a GoFundMe.
That's before the munchies and grifters infiltrate the group. Their African Bum Disease is WORSE than yours - maybe like me they have 3 buttcheeks, that's
50% more bum to have disease in and frankly it's a miracle they're still alive. Those stupid doctors say they're faking and their third buttcheek is just their coccyx, so they have to see Dr. Feelgoodovic in Belgrade who will totally give you Ketamine for your African Bum Disease and if you don't get it you DIE! So now even the people who really do have African Bum Disease are competing with munchies and grifters to be the sickest and the most deserving of powerchairs and primo Serbian Ketamine. Of course, the munchies and grifters will want to become admins because they can abuse their powers for attention and self-promotion, so soon enough people pretending to be lunatics are running the asylum. Any good advice or questioning as to why they need speedballs to get up in the morning results in a ban. Nobody gets better.
This is why I think anyone with a chronic illness should steer away from "support groups" if they're not led and run by medical professionals. It's not just a case of some groups being bad, it's the case that these groups will inevitably become bad because of the dynamics within them.
“She believes she is being used by God to help others”.
