Howzit Bedsters, 

It’s been a tough month, what with the taxi strikes and talk of Stage 16 load shedding, the distressing heat and fires in the northern hemisphere, the floods and sapping cold in the south – not to mention Lizzo being found to have feet of clay. It’s definitely time for a little fun to take our mind off things.  

So, I’ve commissioned BedBuzz magazine to entertain you with a quiz. Challenge your family, employer, doctor or national health authority to tick all the boxes that apply, and settle in with your popcorn and electrolytes to watch their reactions. It’s a (hollow) laugh a minute.

How Staminist Are You?

1. Do you take your Well privilege for granted?
2. Do you sometimes forget to cherish your status as pre-Disabled in a world where one in four is functionally compromised?
3. Do you suspect that getting Sick is fundamentally a sign of weakness?
4. Do you believe that Self-Care and Positivity can be as powerful as mitigating drugs such as insulin, antiretrovirals or chemotherapy?
5. Do you assume daily exercise is good for everyone’s health?
6. Do you believe that everyone with enough willpower has the capacity to Push Through feeling ill?
7. Have you ever suggested to someone Sick that they need to Try Harder to Get Well?
8. Does your school, church or left-leaning organisation congratulate itself on its inclusive credentials, but has suspended mandatory masking policy within unventilated spaces, thereby denying access to the immunocompromised?
9. Do you believe a lack of stamina shows a lack of commitment/backbone/effort, or all three?
10. Do you assume that if someone is capable of doing something one day, they must be malingering if they say they are incapable of doing it the next?
11. Do you assume that chronically Sick people chooseto stay in Bed for months and years on end?
12. Do you think you are entitled to ask a person short on spoons to tell you their entire medical history?
13. Have you ever accused a Sick person of being a ‘faker’, ‘shirker’ or ‘scrounger’?
14. Do you assume Disability is always visible and constant?
15. Do you tend to assume the person in front of you is exaggerating their pain? Especially if they happen to be female, BIPOC or otherwise marginalised?
16. Have you ever suggested, at a conference or in a medical paper, that Sick people with severe energy-impairment and blood oxygen deficiencies should be able to exercise their way back to health or to think themselves Well?
17. Have you implied, in national and international media, that if they refuse this ‘treatment’, they should not be entitled to state or insurance benefits?
18. Have you ever colluded with government agencies or insurance companies to deny disability grants to chronically ill people by psychologising their disease?
19. Have you ever arranged a forced removal of a Sick person to a psych ward or denied basic healthcare to an energy-impaired individual in a hospital?
20. Have you ever removed a severely energy-impaired child from their home against their will and accused their parents of Munchausen syndrome by proxy? Have you advised nurses to force the child to walk to the bathroom or feed themselves when they were incapable, or to throw them in a swimming pool* to ‘prove’ they were faking?

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above questions, welcome to your new identity: you are a Staminist! Tot up your totals to see how extreme your Staminism is.

1-5: I’m not a Staminist, but…
6-10: Proud Staminista
11-15: Staministing Hard!
16-20: Shameless Staminazi! 

If they’re honest, everyone – including me – ticks 1-10 before they get Sick themselves. Staminism oppresses us all, keeps us flogging ourselves to oil the capitalist machine.

(Remember to wear a mask in unventilated spaces, folks. The WHO says there’s a new supervariant out there, causing a massive spike in cases and still a one in five chance of being disabled by Long Covid. Don’t ignore the warning just because your government is.)

Staminism is an ignorant attitude that dismisses or belittles the painful energy-limited experience of the chronically ill. That fails to account for the impact of energy impairment on every aspect of our lives. That condemns us as weak, when we are, in fact, Sick.

If you saw the World Cup Final last month, you will appreciate the uproar following the unsolicited kiss smacked on the lips of winning Spanish striker Jenni Hermoso (33) by crotch-grabbing president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales (46). 

These days, consent is taught in schools. Children are educated to understand that an atmosphere that allows ‘minor’ sexist behaviour such as cat-calling and ‘locker room banter’ is foundational to a pyramid of abuse that culminates in rape. 

In the same way, ‘minor’ staminist behaviour such as insinuating a Sick person is not trying hard enough, or accusing them of faking, lays the ground for appalling physical abuse of the severely chronically ill. 

Disbelief and derision in the face of disability-fluidity undermines the Sick’s capacity to ask for accommodations they should be entitled to in schools, shops and workplaces. Denial of energy-impairment keeps Sick people trapped in their houses, in their beds, in solitary confinement. In hospitals, staminism puts the severely Sick, the most vulnerable humans on earth, in grave danger. At its peak, staminist hate speech enables eugenics. 

What we need taught in schools is empathy.

If you recognise abuse of power and widespread historical injustices perpetrated by the Metropolitan Police, the Catholic Church or the Republican Party but have never considered the effects of entrenched institutional bias in the global medico-insurance industrial complex, you are part of the problem. 

*I bet you thought I was exaggerating about the swimming pool. But in the 1980s, Ean Proctor, a British boy whose ME became so severe that he was mute and immobile at the age of 12, was taken from his home and put in a psychiatric hospital for nearly six months. His mother said “They thought we were making him ill. Ean was in a wheelchair, he couldn’t speak, his hands were in tight fists. He was all skin and bones — he looked like something out of Belsen. How could he do anything?” 

According to an interview with Ean conducted by Dr Anne Macintyre for a Channel 4 documentary in 1993 (from 19.00), he was subject to inhumane treatments, including being left to soil himself and to sink in a swimming pool to try to snap him out of his ‘psychological illness’. One of the consulting psychiatrists was Sir Simon Wessely, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and current Non-Executive Director on the board of the NHS. DM

Dispatches from Bed is a window into the world of the chronically energy-impaired. 

Read Part One: Dispatches from Bed – whose Great Resignation?  

Part Two: Long Covid – it’s better to be broke than have your met…  

Part Three: The Sick are not faking being ill, we’re faking being Well 

Part Four: Do Sick Lives Matter? 

Part Five: It’s time to normalise being Sick in public 

Part Six: The Seven Deadly Symptoms of ME and Long Covid 

Part Seven: The Seven Deadly Symptoms of ME and Long Covid (Part Two)

Part Eight: Why we need Sick Pride as well as Disability Pride