Caetextia and CFS

We reviewed the cases of people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) that we had seen and found certain characteristics stood out that clearly overlap with caetextia/Asperger’s syndrome. These include:

  • inability to think contextually, leading to unrealistic expectations of capabilities. People may talk about life goals that are not really reachable from where they are. For example, one right-brained caetextic woman with a diagnosis of CFS had, as her somewhat unrealistic aim in life, “healing wild animals, like lions and tigers”. A depressed, left-brained caetextic man had an equally unrealistic goal of starting a sailing school in Malta, when he couldn’t sail or even swim
  • a history of relationship difficulties
  • difficulties in developing rapport with a therapist, due to obsessive self-focus and lack of emotional reciprocity
  • resistance to change, inflexibility of thought and rigid behaviour patterns
  • problems with short-term memory, concentration and maintaining attention, typical of predominantly right-brained people. (By contrast, left-brained caetextics have enormous powers of concentration.)
  • sleep disturbance
  • clinical depression
  • extreme mood swings – sufferers may get angry or depressed for no apparent reason
  • inability to ‘read’ what others might be thinking
  • tendency to do too much at one go, then collapse with exhaustion. This can take the form of workaholism: taking on tremendous responsibility, working excessively hard and then collapsing
  • perfectionism. Combined with an excessive workload, this stresses the immune system to such an extent that even a simple viral infection can trigger CFS. Indeed, CFS is sometimes called post-viral fatigue syndrome.

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