How psychiatrists became so wrong about environmental illnesses (MCS and EHS)

Psychologists and psychiatrists often believe multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) and electrical hypersensitivity (EHS) are mental illnesses. They are wrong. We describe here how they became so mistaken.

Keywords:    chemical sensitivity, MCS, electrical sensitivity, EHS, mental illness, psychiatry, psychology

A cruel mistake

Mistakenly labeling people with environmental illnesses as mentally ill has enormous consequences. It gives bosses, coworkers, friends, family, and medical professionals license to ignore the sick person’s pleas for reasonable accommodation and understanding.

That means workplaces, medical facilities, public places, and private homes become hostile places for people with the illness. The sick often become socially isolated, underserved by the medical system, jobless, poor, and sometimes even homeless. Funding for research that could help the sick is not available, as it is falsely believed there is no need.

Much of this could have been prevented. How did we get into this situation?

No objective diagnosis

There are no objective ways to make any of the psychiatric diagnoses that are being applied to people with MCS or EHS. They cannot use any blood tests, x-ray images or any other objective lab tests. They have some questionnaires, which are based on statistics, but are not really objective either, and can be very wrong for some diseases, as we shall see later.

A psychiatrist makes a diagnosis based on a set of criteria and personal judgement, based on what the person says and acts in front of the psychiatrist.

When the psychiatrist observes what appears to be “strange” behavior, that is used to make the diagnoses. But what is “strange” is subjective. Some cultural norms will appear strange to people from other cultures. Having MCS or EHS can force people to live in ways that seem “strange” to outsiders (people who do not live with the illness.)

The fact that psychiatrists and scientists have applied a very wide range of diagnoses to people with MCS or EHS shows how clueless they really are.

The field of psychiatry also has a long history of claiming people are mentally ill who actually were not, and to employ faddish treatments and diagnostic methods not based on any science. They have in particular been cruel towards women.

More on these failures later in this article.

Looking like anxiety – to outsiders

Anxiety is perhaps the most common label put on people with MCS or EHS. Anxiety can manifest in several ways, that each have their own name.

Agoraphobia is a fear of going out in public. People with severe MCS or EHS are often hurt by going to public places, so they naturally limit how often they go. Or they may go only at times when there are few other people. This is quite sensible to anyone with the disease.

But to an outsider, it looks like agoraphobia (Black 1993; Leznoff 1997; Kurt 1990). Outsiders have never had the experience themselves that chemical fumes and wireless radiation can hurt, and they refuse to accept it in others, so they think it is irrational to avoid the places of danger.

Social phobia is an extreme fear of being around other people.

People who do not have MCS are usually very resistant to tone down, or eliminate their use of toxic personal care products and laundry chemicals. Likewise, people consider it an imposition if asked to fully power down their portable electronics.

Thanksgiving party in the MCS/EHS neighborhood in Snowflake, Arizona. Socializing with other people with the illness is a way to break the forced isolation.

There are plenty of cases where asking people to accommodate instead resulted in outright harassment, including in medical facilities (Lipson 2004; EI Wellspring 2024).

A particular bad example is a medical assistant who complained about someone’s strong scent. She was then attacked with a fragrance spray and suffered anaphylactic shock (Lessenger 2001).

Even people who do try to be helpful may not succeed. If they have used scented detergent and fabric softener to wash their clothes, these chemicals do not wash out again. The clothes still emit noxious fumes even after repeated washings with a non-toxic detergent. Someone who switches to non-toxic laundry products may get frustrated that it is not enough, especially since they can’t smell the difference and it doesn’t hurt them.

Even people who are willing to turn off their gadgets very often forget, as it is not important to them. Or they are not aware of the many other sources of radiation in their homes. The need to check is socially awkward and causes tension.

Such pushback often forces people with severe MCS or EHS into social isolation, which outsiders commonly misinterpret as a social phobia (Boyd 2012).

If the sick people do something about their social isolation by making friends with people who are naturally safe to be around – people with the same illness – the mental health outsiders look at that dimly too (Black 1990, 1993; Brodsky 1983).

Obsessive–compulsive disorder is when people feel they have to do certain rituals. Otherwise, they feel very unsettled. The standard example is someone who has to check many times that the stove really is off. Or when they leave home they have to check and recheck many times that the front door really, truly is locked.

To outsiders, some things people with MCS do look a lot like OCD, even though it is fully rational. New clothes are often washed many times before they are worn the first time. New purchases are offgassed until they no longer smell of chemicals. These tasks are routine in an MCS household, but difficult to understand for an outsider who does not get sickened by new things and often cannot even smell the fumes.

Panic disorder is when people feel they are dying or react very strongly to a perceived threat. Living with severe MCS or EHS often means never feeling safe, always having to be on the lookout. They are often hurt on a daily basis by other people, even though that is usually not their intent.

Some people with MCS or EHS do develop panic disorders, depressions, anxiety, OCD etc. But not everybody does, and it seems more likely that the traumatic experiences imposed by the diseases are the cause. More about this later.

Hypochondria

When people get MCS or EHS, they often have to try several doctors to find one who is willing to take them seriously.

Most doctors don’t really know about MCS or EHS, and many who do just don’t say anything since it is controversial. They rarely level with the patient saying they’ve heard about this disease; that it is controversial; that they can’t help, etc. They just don’t say anything, or give very vague answers. This does not help the patient, as it just prolongs the search for answers and makes them distrust the medical system.

And then there are doctors who insist it’s all imagined, which isn’t helpful either.

If your car breaks down and the mechanic you go to can’t figure out the problem, you go to one who can – same with doctors. To psychiatrists, this “doctor shopping” is what hypochondriacs do (Black 1993).

Many patients experience the medical system to be unhelpful, dogmatic and sometimes outright hostile towards them. It also doesn’t help that the American health system is so focused on enriching the already rich. It is no wonder people with MCS and EHS are dissatisfied with the system. Meanwhile, psychiatrists and other physicians are unable to look at their own collective behavior. Instead, they misinterpret this dissatisfaction as a strong sign of hypochondrianism (Black 1993; Brodsky 1983).

There are even psychiatrists who postulate that physicians who accept and try to help the sick people are turning them into hypochondriacs (Black 1996).

Seen from the patient’s perspective, blind trust in the doctors is irrational. When the doctors disregard, minimize, and psychologize real symptoms, and have nothing to offer that helps, that erodes trust in the system. When doctors hide from the patient what they know about the illness, that it has a name and other people report similar observations, that doesn’t help either.

When doctors tell very sick patients “there is nothing wrong,” that totally destroys any trust.

Wimps

Some simply suggest the sick people are wimps. That they focus on “minor” symptoms too much, and thus make too much of a fuss, they say. This idea is packaged into the name “symptom amplification” (Schottenstein 1987).

Somatization

Somatization is when a person has physical symptoms that are entirely created by the mind.

When a physician does not accept the existence of MCS and EHS, then the symptoms are considered “unexplained.” Unexplained in practice means “all in the head,” i.e. somatoform or psychosomatic. This is a heavy bias towards labeling people as psychosomatic. It helps create a cruel feedback loop, since researchers point to the many people given a mental label as a reason to not accept MCS and EHS, and since the diseases are not considered legit, then people with them are routinely labeled with some mental disease, and so it goes.

Conditioned response

The classic example of a conditioned response is Pavlov’s dogs. Whenever he fed his dogs he also rang a bell. After some time the dogs would salivate if he just rang the bell. Some scientists suggest MCS is simply the same as Pavlov’s dogs; that people get sick because they smell something they associate with sickness (Devriese 2000).

One problem with that theory is that Pavlov’s dogs could never be trained if they were not fed. How would MCS patients get “trained” if they were not hurt by chemicals to start with?

Some report that their MCS started after a single strong chemical exposure. Perhaps that could create a Pavlovian conditioned response. However, the majority of the patients say their illness came gradually and there was no such major event (Gibson 2003; Berg 2008; Terr 1986).

There are a few people with MCS who lost their sense of smell decades before they got MCS. They still get sick from “odors” they are unaware of.

There have also been studies where the patients could not smell what they were exposed to, so they had no olfactory cue (Rea 1989; Millqvist 1999).

Post-traumatic stress disorder

The idea here is that MCS is a manifestation of PTSD. The person experiences some sort of traumatic experience at the same time they smell some odor. Then when they later smell the same odor, they supposedly have a flashback (Stenn 1998a, 1998b).

That could not explain the majority of MCS sufferers, who did not have a rapid onset of the illness. Neither can it explain those so sensitized to chemicals they react to concentrations so low they cannot smell them (Rea 1989, Millqvist 1999).

Becoming disabled with MCS or EHS can be a traumatic experience. The whole world effectively becomes a hostile place, where it is hard to feel safe, even in one’s own home. Additional stressors often include severe financial distress, broken families, and a hostile medical system.

It no surprise that PTSD-like behavior is observed in some of the stricken, especially in the early years of disability, until they’ve figured out more stable living conditions.

Technophobia

When sufferers of MCS or EHS are hurt by chemicals or electronics, and are told by authority figures that there is nothing to worry about, they start to lose faith. It becomes clear from personal experience that the people who are supposed to be the experts are not as smart as they appear. This may then lead to a wider skepticism of exposure standards, corporate influences, government agencies, political corruption, and the medical system.

A healthy skepticism is warranted, since there are many well-documented abuses, with trivializing cigarettes, asbestos, and lead the most widely known examples. It is hard to know where the line of trust should go, since it has been broken so many times.

Some people even move on to believe in conspiracy theories, though that is not the norm in the MCS/EHS communities.

Meanwhile, to the psychiatric establishment, such skepticism seems irrational and anti-science. Some even see it as paranoia (Szemerszky 2021).

It seems unlikely that people who are trained as engineers are technophobes, yet plenty of them do get sick (Dieudonne 2016; Hviid 2024).

Temporal onset of symptoms and illness

There have been a couple of studies suggesting that the cases had medically unexplained symptoms/psychological problems prior to their reported onset of MCS (Simon 1993; Sparks 1990).

Such studies are very difficult to do, as they rely on recall and most people have a gradual onset of MCS. People may have symptoms caused by a mild version of MCS before they actually think they have MCS, and thus do not attribute them to their MCS.

The Sparks study was funded by a major employer which had a strong interest in claiming their employees were sick prior to employment. This makes the whole study suspect.

MCS and EHS in the workplace

We have found only one study of environmentally ill people still in the workplace (Osterberg 2007). The study looked at 84 people with either MCS, EHS or both who were less severe cases and actively working.

They found lower levels of job performance and job satisfaction, increased bullying and other job-factors, besides increased levels of stress, sleep problems, etc. All of them are as expected for people with mid-level environmental illnesses, when struggling to hold on to their jobs.

However, the study team expected mid-level sufferers to have much fewer such effects than more severe cases. They then erroneously interpret that as support for a psychosomatic explanation of MCS and EHS.

An American study also looked at how stressed workers with MCS were while working, but only after they became sick and stopped working (Sparks 1990). It too found stress before the workers were fully disabled, and also took that as indicating mental illness started before MCS, and thus could be the cause.

Not familiar

Are psychiatrists who write about MCS or EHS even familiar with these diseases? It does not appear they are.

They may see a patient now and then in their offices, but that does not help much, as they are not likely to be mainstream MCS or EHS patients.

The vast majority of people with MCS/EHS do not go to psychiatrists. Those who go for such help are not representative, but psychiatrists apparently think so, since they are the only patients they ever see. Thus, it is easy to think everyone with MCS or EHS have psychiatric problems. This mechanism was apparently also a part of the common belief among psychiatrist in the 1960s that gay men all had mental illnesses. They never met any openly gay men outside their offices (Faderman 2015: ch 16).

Some psychiatrists are hired by insurance companies to evaluate people who are applying for disability. Meeting such an applicant is also not representative. It is a single interview that may last an hour, and the applicants will often be stressed by the situation. Their lives have just crashed with all that entails, including stressful relations to family, job loss, loss of income, and much else. Also, the interview is a high-stakes game that is biased against the sick applicant. A failure to convince that they are not faking it could have severe financial consequences. If the disability application is denied, it could mean homelessness (and homeless shelters do not accommodate people with MCS/EHS). No wonder some people tend to be rather anxious in that situation. They are kept hostage, with all the stress that entails.

Some psychiatrists claim that MCS bestows “secondary gain” upon the sick person:

The ‘illness’ stabilizes social relationships, it allows withdrawal from unbearable strains and guarantees personal and professional care (Bornschein 2001).

The reality is exactly the opposite of what Dr. Bornschein postulates: having MCS is a major cause of divorce, it imposes enormous strains in daily life, and the medical system is often hostile.

Here is another example of a claimed “benefit” of MCS:

She is relieved of overwhelming demands from home, family, and job, and others must now take care of her (Brodsky 1989)

Except the sick person is very often left to fend for herself, with no support from family. For a similar statement, see also (Schottenfeld 1987).

An obvious sign of how far out of touch psychiatrists can be, is when they suggest avoiding chemical exposures in unwarranted (Simon 1993; Magill 1998).

Such statements only serve to give health providers and others license to not accommodate a basic need. The sick people know very well what hurts and do not listen to such nonsense.

A psychiatrist sitting in an office simply has no way of grasping what living with severe MCS or EHS is like. They don’t even know what questions to ask (and American doctors tend to control the conversation, so the patient is unlikely to tell them unasked). It is so far removed from their own life experiences. There is nothing in their training about it. There are no seminars taught by people who are really familiar with the illnesses. The only seminars were taught by other psychiatrists who had little knowledge themselves, and were known for their bias.

It is far too easy to make the wrong assumptions. To downplay, dismiss, and psychologize what is well beyond their own comfort zone. This leads to absurd assertions, such that environmental illnesses are actually schizophrenia or paranoia (Weiss 2017; Szemerszky 2012).

Psychiatrists are clearly outsiders, unless they are personally familiar with the illnesses.

This writer has been interviewed by five different psychiatrists under high-stakes conditions. None of them appeared much familiar with MCS/EHS, if at all. One admitted he had seen one case of MCS, the others said nothing about their experiences. Their questions showed their lack of familiarity with the illness.

How many cases?

One psychiatrist makes sweeping and rather absurd generalizations about people with EHS (Pierre 2022). At least he is honest and admits “it’s something I’ve seen in my real-life clinical practice as a psychiatrist on more than one occasion.” That must mean two or three people. It is not even clear they actually had EHS.

Another psychiatrist was one of the most outspoken critics of MCS in medical journals, news media, and medical symposia. He admitted to a journalist that he had only treated a handful of people with MCS over his entire 35-year career (Xi 2022). Other than that, he or his associates had interviewed a total of 26 people for his studies (Black 1990, 1993, 2001).

When he published his first study in 1990, he admitted to another journalist he had made up his mind about MCS before he did the study (NYT 1990). In his own article, he admits he saw only one case of MCS before doing the study (Black 1990).

Despite these biases, and many design flaws in his study, it was used extensively in the 1990s to “prove” MCS was a purely mental disease (EI Wellspring 2023). It is still cited in recent research (Weiss 2017).

Invisible diseases

MCS and EHS are usually invisible diseases. In some cases there are mild signs such as inflammation with MCS, or facial flushing with EHS, but usually there are no visible signs or striking lab results.

There are several other invisible diseases, such as many autoimmune diseases. For some diseases, such as endometriosis and celiac, the visible signs are internal. People with these diseases are also often psychologized until they get a proper diagnosis.

The altered lifestyle

Psychiatrists write about the altered lifestyle that is imposed on people with MCS. For those with severe MCS it can be a drastic change in terms of personal care products and modifications of the home.

To the psychiatrists this is a sign of mental illness. One of the most vocal critics of MCS at the time, psychologist Herman Staudenmayer, stated to the Boston Globe (Bandler 1998):

No matter what you do to the ‘sick’ building, it will not meet the demands of the afflicted. Nothing is ever enough.

Making a home safe for people with severe MCS is indeed difficult. It is like someone having five nails stuck in the foot. If four of them are pulled out, the person is not doing much better. You have to pull all the nails out. Half measures are not good enough, and half measures are often all that outsiders are willing to consider.

The 1990s was a time of much experimentation regarding how to make houses safe. There were successes and failures. Today, what to do is much better understood, and if people follow good advice, the houses are usually successful.

But many people cannot afford to build their own home and have to resort to half-measures.

For other changes to the lifestyle, such as avoiding fragranced people and toxic personal care products, those measures really do help. That is why people do them, and rate avoidance the most effective measure (Gibson 2003).

It is just too easy for an outsider to dismiss what they have not experienced themselves as “not real” and just psychologize the sick people.

The many symptoms

The symptoms of MCS and EHS vary with the person, and often wax and vane for reasons that are not always obvious. The symptoms are mostly neurological, such as headaches, brain fog, and various pains, which cannot be objectively measured.

This complex picture is often used by psychiatrists as a reason to label people as psychosomatic (Black 1993; Davidoff 1994; Bornschein 2001).

Future doctors are taught in medical school that the more symptoms a patient has, the more likely they are psychosomatic. Having many diverse symptoms also gives a higher score on tests for psychosomatic illness, which automatically tilts towards a psych label (Davidoff 2000).

Smoking can produce about two dozen different health effects. They are very diverse, ranging from hardened arteries to prematurely aging skin, low birthweight, emphysema, and various cancers.

Autoimmune diseases can result in many diverse symptoms that are neurological. They too vary with the person and over time without any apparent reason. People with these illnesses are also commonly written off as psychosomatic (O’Rourke 2022).

Long Covid can produce 203 different symptoms in ten different organ systems (Davis 2021).

Mastocytosis and mast cell activation syndrome are other examples.

Before Covid-19, medical journals and journalists usually refused to mention brain fog as a symptom, even though it has been known for many decades as common in people with MCS.

Selection bias

The psychiatric literature is mostly written by psychiatrists who are clearly not very familiar with MCS and EHS. Several early articles were anecdotes, and they tended to highlight the most sensational, just as journalists tend to do.

In that same spirit, we here present some of the most egregious examples.

Recently, professor Joseph Pierre of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote an article in the online version of Psychology Today (Pierre 2022).

He spends pages talking about some paranoid ideas held by people who believe they are “targeted” by secret government agencies. He also found some postings about that on the web (though apparently not posted by people with MCS or EHS).

He then states:

Those who believe they suffer from EHS are often convinced that they’re being harassed by government agents or zapped by invisible energy waves.

This author has personally met nearly a hundred people with EHS. Not one of them ever said anything about believing the government (or Elon Musk, or Bill Gates) were somehow targeting them or harassing them.

As mentioned earlier, Dr. Pierre has only met such a patient “on more than one occasion” in his clinical practice. That sure provides a solid statistical basis for his statements.

If he had, say, three patients who were psychiatrists with pedophile tendencies, would he write an article about them, claiming psychiatrists “often” have a pedophilia problem? Of course not. He knows that is not the case because he knows a lot of psychiatrists. But he has apparently never met people with EHS outside of his practice.

Our second example is a study of eighteen people who have MCS (Black 2001). The main author is professor Donald Black of the University of Iowa and one of the most outspoken opponents of accepting MCS.

Dr. Black admitted to a journalist that he had actually only treated a handful of people with MCS over his entire career (Xi 2022). He (or his two associates) interviewed a total of 26 people for his MCS articles (Black 1990, 1993, 2001), as mentioned earlier.

In his 2001 article he describes just one person out of eighteen. It was clearly a person with little understanding of physics and materials, as she believed metal ions could pass through glass cooking pots and into her food, besides other questionable ideas.

Again, these are definitely not common beliefs in the MCS community, but by highlighting them Dr. Black tries to make the unusual appear common.

He said the person lived in a small town in Iowa. This author also lives in such an area, and it can be rather shocking to a highly educated person what local healthy people believe. This author knows people who believe in perpetual motion machines, miracle fuels that double gas mileage, and much else that supposedly involves government suppression or well-known individuals. And these are regular folks who do not have MCS or EHS.

It’s just when someone with MCS or EHS believes such things we hear about it. The book The Quiet Zone is partly about an EHS community in West Virginia. Written by journalist Stephen Kurczy, it is another example. He reports on the wacky beliefs a few of the people with EHS have, with no mention that those are also common beliefs among regular people in such rural areas.

In 1993 the psychologist-psychiatrist duo Herman Staudenmayer and John Selner did a small study where sixty percent of twenty women with MCS were found to have been sexually abused as a child (Staudenmayer 1993).

Based on that, they advocated widely that MCS was simply unresolved sexual abuse (Staudenmayer 1997; Stenn 1998; EI Wellspring 2023).

The study reaches such a high number of reported abuses by using “repressed memory therapy.” That was a popular method at the time, where the therapist supposedly brought forward hidden memories through questions. The method is now fully discredited. The supposedly repressed memories were actually false suggestions created by the therapist.

The Staudenmayer study reported that thirty percent of the twenty women had these fake “repressed” memories of childhood abuses.

Despite resting on a quack idea, the article was not retracted. Fourteen years later, Staudenmayer’s claim was tested by a larger study, which totally refuted it (Bailer 2007). But Staudenmayer’s study still shows up in popular media and research papers (Eis 2008; Broudy 2020).

In a Hungarian study of 700 random people, they found 31 cases of EHS (Szemerszky 2021). The scientists had to use three decimals to make their results statistically significant (the confidence interval starts at 1.006). That alone should raise some eyebrows.

Our last example is an article by I. Boyd, James Rubin, and Simon Wessely of King’s College in London. Rubin and Wessely have a long history of psychologizing diseases such as CFS, MCS and EHS. In this article they accuse people with MCS or EHS of wanting to isolate themselves from mainstream society (Boyd 2012).

They base this ludicrous claim on a television program and a couple of newspaper stories of people who had to flee the toxic city. Boyd, Rubin, and Wessely never considered the true reason: that these people did not move voluntarily. None of the featured people indicated they fled voluntarily. It is surprising a peer-reviewed medical journal published it.

In the same article they mention the EHS community around Green Bank in West Virginia. It does not occur to them that one attraction of moving there is the opportunity to have a social life and not be a hermit.

There are several similar communities in Southwest USA. They allow people to have a social life without constantly having to ask people to turn off their gadgets and dodging their toxic personal care products. Without constantly be doubted and questioned by people who are told by outsiders that MCS and EHS is all imagined.

Some people move back to the polluted cities because they miss their families too much, despite the hardship.

That doesn’t seem like a lot of wishes to be hermits. But outsiders would not know this.

The paragon expectation

People who get sick with MCS or EHS are just regular people, with the faults and limitations that people have. That should be obvious, but there is a tendency to highlight any personality flaws and hold the sick people to an impossibly high standard. And if just a few people with the illness fall through, that reflects upon everybody.

They are also expected to all be experts on their disease, and speak for everyone. Again, when they fall short it means everybody with the illness.

Popular media does this all the time. Psychiatrists are not much better, as shown earlier in the examples with Drs. Pierre and Black (Pierre 2022; Black 2001).

Women who were raped have been subjected to the exact same demand of being paragons. Fortunately, the MeToo movement made this problem more visible.

There are also double-standards regarding the MCS/EHS patients’ emotional health and their ability to not react to placebos (see next two sections).

But studies show a lot of mental illness…

Nearly all such studies are small, and focuses on the severe cases. Some also recruited patients from psychiatric clinics. This makes them show higher numbers of mental illness.

Many of these reports were made on patients under very high stress, as they were being evaluated by the same doctor whether they qualified for disability or not (Terr 1986; Brodsky 1983; Sparks 1990; Leznoff 1997). The stakes are very high in that situation, which is hard to comprehend by a physician who lives a cushy life and has never faced such a situation.

It may also elevate the findings that most studies were done on patients who were new to the illness, as that is a simple way to recruit study subjects (Brodsky 1983; Terr 1986; Sparks 1990; Bornschein 2002; Eis 2008). Being new to MCS is especially stressful, as they are in the middle of having their life forcefully upended and the future looks very uncertain. Again, something a physician will have little comprehension of.

A large Canadian study included people with MCS from ten provinces. There were people with all levels of severity of the illness, and people both newly sick and old timers. They did not recruit people through clinics. This study is much more representative of the MCS population than any other.

They found that 19 percent had some sort of mental disorder, mostly depression or anxiety (Park 2017). This is in line with what was found in a smaller similar study (Caress 2003), and studies of people living with other sorts of disabilities (Noh 2016; Bing 2001; Patterson 1990).

Studies of just the severe cases show higher levels of depression, anxiety, etc, though they still find a lot of patients who are deemed emotionally healthy (Black 1990; Bornschein 2002; Eis 2008).

That is no surprise, as living with these diseases is often a traumatic experience. For the severe cases it is completely life-altering and can mean a loss of income, family, friends and even homelessness. Further insult is often added by a hostile medical system (Dumit 2006; Gibson 2016).

The experience can be similar to living in an abusive household: the arracks happen without warning, the attackers deny any wrongdoing, the victim feels trapped and rarely safe. Studies of domestic violence also finds such higher levels of depression and anxiety (Adkins 2010; Ludemir 2008; Alejo 2014).

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk specializes in traumas. In his book (2014) he states:

Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health…

People with severe MCS or EHS are routinely denied feeling safe with other people, including physicians.

Many severe cases have to effectively live in forced isolation, as other people refuse to accommodate their needs. It is well-documented that alone can cause depression, anxiety, PTSD, and more, especially with longer isolation (Brooks 2020).

The discrimination against the sick people may also take a toll. The medical profession is especially guilty of this, and also promotes it in others with its refusal to accept MCS and EHS.

Nobody has studied what such discrimination does to people, but discrimination against other minority groups is shown to have mental health effects, especially depression and anxiety (Kurtz 2023; Elliott 2021: ch 16).

Some of the MCS mental health studies compare severe MCS patients to people who are healthy (Black 1990; Poonai 2001; Eis 2008). They should have compared with people who have faced other forms of traumatic experience to make it fair, such as bad car accidents, disfiguring burns, severe disabilities, domestic violence, and the like.

There appears to be only two such studies. One found MCS patients had more depression and anxiety than people with musculoskeletal injuries (Simon 1993). It appears the MCS group was newly sick, while the control group had been sick for a long time, and thus was more settled.

The other, larger study compared MCS and non-MCS patients at clinics in Germany, and found no difference in their mental health (Eis 2008).

When the first MCS mental health study came out in 1990, The New York Times interviewed a physician who actually treated people with MCS. He stated (NYT 1990):

I don’t think there’s ever been a study done comparing healthy community members with a group of patients who suffer from a chronic illness that hasn’t found more psychopathology among the patient group.

But such voices of reason were ignored.

No less than five studies compared MCS patients’ emotional distress level before and after they got sick. They all showed the distress was dramatically increased by MCS (Sparks 1990; Simon 1993; Davidoff 1996; Caress 2003; Johnson 2017). Others have made contradictory observations (Brodsky 1983; Eis 2008).

An illuminating study was published in 2000 by scientists at Johns Hopkins University. They asked 41 mental health professionals to assume MCS was a fully legitimate medical disorder, and that a mentally healthy person got MCS. How would this person respond on the standardized MMPI-2 personality test, as a result of living with MCS? (Davidoff 2000).

These professionals gave the highest increases to the MMPI-2 sub-scales for hypochondriasis, hysteria, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, and depression. This despite the assumed person is fully mentally healthy.

And these are indeed the scales real-life MCS patients score high on (Davidoff 2000).

People with accepted neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and brain injuries also show falsely elevated results (Fiedler 1996).

Diagnostic tests

Psychiatry and psychology do not have any objective ways to make a diagnosis. There are no blood tests, x-rays, or visual cues to support them. The best they have are questionnaires and “observations,” and these are flawed.

Despite this damning evidence against blindly using such personality tests to mislabel people with MCS as mentally ill, that practice is still completely dominant. The Davidoff study is rarely mentioned anywhere. And it has never been repeated.

“But, the exposure studies…”

There have been many studies of people with EHS and MCS where they were exposed to chemicals or electromagnetic radiation. In most of the studies they could not reliably tell the difference between active challenges and placebos.

That appears to be a clear case that MCS and EHS are “not real.” The detractors clearly think so. This includes the Rubin-Wessely group at King’s College’s psychiatry department, whose opinions are widely cited (Rubin 2005, 2011; Das Munshi 2006).

On the surface, it appears simple to do these “provocation” studies – especially to people who are not really familiar with the illnesses, which includes most of the scientists who did these studies. To say it bluntly, most of these studies are like placing asthmatics in a room with a cigar smoker, and then trying to see if they can reliably detect whether there is also a cigarette smoker in there or not.

When the scientists have the bias that MCS/EHS is all in the head, then it is easy to slack off on the environmental controls. That includes using a placebo that is not really inert, which is the case in all the MCS studies that used a “masking odor” as a “placebo.”

Even with a perfect setup, there are other major difficulties, such as the nocebo effect.

When healthy people are exposed to a harmless gas, a lot of them feel sick if they are told it is an industrial solvent, while fewer feel sick if told it’s a beneficial gas (Dalton 1999; Lorber 2007).

An even stronger demonstration is a study of chemotherapy drugs. The drugs were given by injection in cancer clinics. People in the waiting room observed how other patients coming back from receiving the injection got sick with the typical chemo symptoms of nausea and vomiting, and that most of the patients lost their hair.

The study had a control group of 130 people who never received any drugs, but were given an inert saline injection. But they all believed they got the chemo drugs. 35 percent got nausea, 21 percent vomited and 31 percent lost their hair (Fielding 1983, Table 6).

Nobody insulted these people with accusations of having imagined illnesses. But when the same thing happens to people with MCS or EHS, then a double standard takes effect. They must be flawless and not have the same limitations as all other people. They must be superhumans, or be written off as psychiatric cases with imagined illnesses.

A well-made study will need to screen out the people who are prone to these effects. Unfortunately, very few do.

There is much more to say about the difficulties and limitations of provocation studies. We have put that in a separate article, which is available through the link at the end of this one.

The difficulties making fair and well-controlled provocation studies are so great it may not be realistic to make them without a large budget. All the studies have been very low-budget.

“It has been thoroughly researched …”

Actually, not so. A search in a medical database found only 320 scientific articles about MCS, compared to 7453 about chronic fatigue syndrome and 9846 about fibromyalgia (Hu 2018). Those two other diseases are also controversial and starved of funding, but there is less organized opposition to them.

For comparison, the number of scientific papers available on dementia was 250,000 and on cancer 3 million (Economist 2020).

What little science there is about MCS and EHS is dominated by researchers assuming the psychological paradigm. There is a paucity of research looking for other explanations. If you don’t even look, how can you find anything?

It is too little to have an effect, they say

An argument made against MCS is that the people with the illness react to chemicals in so low concentrations they can’t possibly have an effect.

This is perhaps true from a purely toxicological view. But some scientists do find neurological effects from similar levels of pheromones (Hummer 2017).

The fragrance industry claims their products enhances people’s mood, which is a neurological effect (Bridges 2002). At the same time, it is not supposed to have any negative neurological effects, they claim.

A woman’s disease

About 70 percent of people with MCS are women. Women dominate even more among severe cases of MCS. In recent past they typically sought medical help when they were around forty years old, though today the illness seems to start somewhat earlier.

Psychiatry has a particularly long history of ignorance and hostility towards women (Ehrenreich 2005). The term “hysteria” is derived from the Greek word for the uterus.

So it is no surprise that women here again are psychologized without evidence. In 1989 a psychiatrist wrote this about women “benefiting” from having MCS (Brodsky 1989):

[T]he restructuring of women’s roles during recent years has increased their tendency to stress- and fatigue-related disorders… She is relieved of overwhelming demands from home, family, and job, and others must now take care of her.

The media cause it

Some researchers suggest the illness is simply caused by media hype:

Over half the households in Manhattan contain one person only. When people in such households arise in the morning they have often only the television with which they can discuss the meaning of puzzling physical sensations. And it will assure them they have chronic fatigue syndrome or multiple chemical sensitivity (Shorter 1997).

Another suggests that websites about the illness causes people to get sick (Winter 2003). This despite people got sick for decades before the internet became widely available. As far as we know, the first MCS website was built in 1998 (called “Lassen”). Websites about EHS came even later.

In reality, many people were sick for years before they heard there was even a name for their illness (Hviid 2024; Dieudonne 2016).

EMF protection charlatans

With no help available from the medical profession, some people with EHS look for technical solutions to limit their exposures.

There is a field of engineering called EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) which offers fully respectable methods to shield radiowaves and otherwise limit exposures. However, these professionals rarely market their products and services to the public and EMC methods are typically not plug-and-play.

There are also a lot of very dubious products available, with many of them clearly sold by charlatans. These products are all plug-and-play, so they are a lot more enticing. With little guidance, some people feel they are helped due to the placebo effect.

It is hard to know the difference for people with no engineering skills, and people can be desperate for relief.

Psychiatrists also do not have EMC training. Some of them thus lump the obvious charlatans together with the legitimate products, such as shielding bed canopies (Pierre 2022).

Just because people are desperate and easy prey for charlatans doesn’t mean they are mentally ill. Before effective treatments became available, many people with tuberculosis, AIDS, and other severe diseases tried questionable treatments of many kinds. It is what desperate people do, however much the medical profession likes to disdain such attempts.

Groupthink

It appears the profession has created an echo chamber where anything that challenges the belief that MCS and EHS is simply some sort of psychiatric problem is immediately dismissed.

The reasonable explanation that the emotional distress seen in several patients is caused by the illness, is just given a one-line brush-off (Black 1990; Weiss 2017). Most articles don’t even mention it.

As already mentioned, when the patients stay away from what makes them sick, they are accused of wanting to isolate themselves (Boyd 2012), or labeled as having agoraphobia (Black 1993; Lenzoff 1997). If they do something to not be socially isolated, then that is wrong too (Brodsky 1983; Black 1990, 1993).

When psychiatrists made a study comparing 23 people with MCS to a group of people diagnosed with schizophrenia, none of the MCS patients had a profile anywhere similar to schizophrenia. This was explained away by accusing the MCS group of lying – no less than three times in the same article (Weiss 2017).

When a person with MCS got relief when her workplace installed a better ventilation system, it was chalked up to be “an extremely effective psychotherapeutic intervention” (Schottenfeld 1987).

When the same psychiatrist met a worker who clearly and accurately could identify chemical leaks before any of the other workers, that too was considered psychiatric (Schottenfeld 1987).

If the patients don’t believe their illness is psychosomatic (“nonacceptance of psychological explanations”), that is considered a sign of mental illness too (Brodsky 1983). How can you then ever avoid getting a mental label?

The psychiatric profession has adopted a different name for MCS. They call it “idiopathic environmental intolerance.” This name was created in 1996, largely by Dr. Ronald Gots, since the chemical industry didn’t like their products to be associated with a disease. They also wanted a name that essentially said “psychosomatic.” The story of this name is well documented and very sordid (EI Wellspring 2021, 2023).

Any political spin doctor, or marketing guru, knows that the chosen name helps maintain a certain impression. The “idiopathic” name is another example of groupthink in the psych-profession.

Despite the “idiopathic” label dominating the psychiatric journals, other fanciful names have been suggested there in later years, such as “alexithymia,” “bodily distress syndrome,” “environmentally annoyed,” and “somato-sensory amplification” (Skovbjerg 2009, 2010; Eek 2009).

They still struggle with fitting MCS into their paradigm of a mental illness.

Another indicator of the isolated language of the psychiatrists is that they still refer to the physicians who treat MCS as “clinical ecologists.” That term became obsolete in 1986. Since then, they have been called “environmental physicians,” practicing “environmental medicine.”

Using terminology to convey a disdain for the patient is also done by the larger medical community. They tend to say that “the patient failed the treatment,” as if it is the patient’s fault the treatment didn’t work (Makary 2012).

Groupthink among the psych professionals has happened many times before, especially about women (Ehrenreich 2005).

And woe the scientist who tries to think outside the box, and criticize the established dogma (Fava 2005; Enserink 2018; Makary 2012).

Modern health worries

A newer construct is to lump people who have MCS or EHS together with people who are skeptical about genetically modified foods, chemical food additives, or drug-centered health care. And people who oppose air pollution or go to alternative health practitioners.

These people are now all suffering from “Modern Health Worries,” with the clear understanding that these “worries” are baseless (Koteles 2013; Domotor 2019).

It is insulting that the potentially life-altering illnesses MCS and EHS now are referred to as “worries.” And their logic is upside down, as they assume without evidence that these “worries” came first, then any illness followed. They don’t seem to consider that people’s personal experiences getting sickened by chemicals or drugs, and then getting blown off by physicians, might cause them to become skeptical towards these things.

Treatments

There is scant evidence that any form of psychiatric or psychological treatment is helpful treating MCS or EHS.

There are some claims of success in the medical journals, but they are mostly about one or two patients. At best, it’s a small group. And there were no follow-ups to see if the treatment was more than just a short-term placebo effect (Stenn 1998).

One study of just three patients only helped one of them. The authors still highly recommend their ideas, and blame the two patients who did not get better (Guglielmi 1994).

The psychiatrist who promoted his idea that MCS was caused by childhood trauma claimed that he could “deprogram” people with MCS. He wrote he could “deprogram” them if they were “receptive to an explanation for a disease other than environmental illness” (Selner 1988).

That is an unkind way to blame the patient as being “unreceptive” if the treatment doesn’t work. Despite that Dr. Selner later published other articles with his opinions about MCS, he never documented his claim that he could “deprogram” people with MCS, never provided any numbers of how many he treated, how many he helped, and there doesn’t seem to be any such programs available now.

These and similar claims may be as valid as the infamous “conversion therapy” that was used on gay men. Psychiatrists claimed at medical conferences that they could “cure” people of being gay (Faderman 2015).

One of the most ardent “MCS is all psychosomatic” supporters, recently admitted that there is no treatment for MCS (Xi 2022).

Since MCS and EHS are not psychiatric illnesses, it is no surprise studies find such treatments to be ineffective and sometimes even harmful. For MCS: (LeRoy 1996; Gibson 2003; Kolk 2004; Hauge 2015). For EHS: (Andersson 1996; Harlacher 1998; Hillert 1998).

But psychotherapy can sometimes be helpful treating the emotional effects caused by the illness (Gibson 2003; Hauge 2015).

This is also recommended for people with heart disease, hypertension, cancer, epilepsy, asthma, and other diseases (Bell 1999).

Another problem here is that physicians believing the psych theory may dismiss the measures that often do help the patients live more comfortable lives (Magill 1998).

The logic seems to be that these treatments are not proven, and they may reinforce the patient’s acceptance of MCS/EHS. One of the aphorisms of psychology is that avoidance doesn’t work. If a person is anxious about something, avoiding it will only make the anxiety worse. Thus, if you fall off a horse, you should get right back on it (Elliott 2021).

Even early on, people with MCS were told to not avoid what made them sick (Terr 1994; Stenn 1998a).

Since MCS and EHS are not anxieties, this advice is dangerous, and has indeed harmed some people who kept exposing themselves. In contrast, avoiding harmful exposures for a long time has helped some people be able to tolerate more, though it is not a cure. There are plenty of anecdotes. Unfortunately, demonstrating it scientifically would be very difficult, and unlikely to pass an ethics committe, as real harm is likely.

Avoiding incitants is consistently rated as the most effective remedy (LeRoy 1996; Gibson 2003). It is cruel to deny what helps in the absence of anything better.

Financial incentives

If MCS became accepted, it would mean serious financial losses to industries producing all sorts of chemical products, building products, personal care products, laundry products, pesticides, cars, and much else.

EHS is similarly a threat to the telecom industry, electronics industry, utilities, and more.

In the year 1990 people with MCS received a lot of sympathy in the media and from government agencies. The chemical and tobacco industries realized the danger to their profits and took action. Just five years later, people with MCS were widely considered psychosomatic pariahs. That story is now available through internal corporate documents made public through lawsuits (EI Wellspring 2023).

It is noteworthy that some of the most-cited reports dismissing MCS were written by people with known corporate connections. Two physicians in San Francisco were regularly evaluating MCS patients for insurance companies (Brodsky 1983; Terr 1986). A study of workers at a Boeing plant was paid for by Boeing (Sparks 1990).

The Monell Center has also psychologized people with MCS (Dalton 1999, CMAJ 2011), without disclosing they are largely funded by the chemical industry.

There are likely more, but most reports did not disclose their source of funding.

As for EHS, the story appears similar, but it happened later and there have not yet been the court cases to force corporations to reveal their internal communications, as happened for MCS. Perhaps it will never happen, as they may be better at destroying the evidence.

MCS and EHS clearly suffer from what scientist John Ioannidis states in an often-cited article:

The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true (Ioannidis 2005).

As the long-time editor of the prestigious medical journal BMJ stated (Smith 2006):

This is a disturbing finding. It suggests that, far from conflicts of interest being unimportant in the objective and pure world of science where method and quality of data is everything, it is the main factor determining the results of studies.

Skeletons in the closet

The professions of psychology and psychiatry have a very large closet of skeletons, besides their current misguided stance on MCS and EHS (and other diseases). In the past they had such silly diagnoses as Syphilophobia, Pathological Mendacity, Vagabondage and Masturbation (Faderman 2015).

Generations of women were told by psychiatrists that sexual gratification was dangerous, that higher education was bad for them, and that they were only fit to be mothers (Ehrenreich 2005).

Textbooks in psychiatry once stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, and that it “diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external word” (van der Kolk 2014: ch 1). Now we know both claims to be completely wrong.

Until 1974, the psychiatric bible, the DSM, listed homosexuality as a mental illness. A 1970 survey of psychiatrists found that 90% agreed (Faderman 2015).

In some cities, such as Wshington, DC, the police abducted gay men and forced them to be committed to psychiatric hospitals. Some psychiatrists forced them to undergo electroshock, forced vomiting, and other quackery to supposedly “cure” them (Faderman 2015).

The profession’s handling of autism was also deplorable. The most well-known example was claiming autism was caused by career-oriented “refrigerator moms.” Until recently, it was not accepted that adults could have autism; parents were told their child would always “grow out of it.” Grown-ups with autism were denied treatment (Denworth 2024).

In the 1980s and early 1990s “repressed memory therapy” was all the rage. It supposedly helped people retrieve deeply repressed memories of rape and other abuses. But in reality much of that was really suggestions implanted by the therapist. They were not true memories. Many innocent people saw their lives ruined by false accusations that were supported in court by psychiatrists. Some were even sent to jail (Gaulston 2008). This quackery was also used against people with MCS, as mentioned earlier (Staudenmayer 1993).

Another once-popular treatment was “primal scream therapy” where people got to went their anger in loud and aggressive ways. It too could backfire, as it sometimes increased unfocused anger (Elliott 2021: ch 16).

“Ice pick lobotomy” was also popular for a while, and ruined thousands of lives. It was as horrifying as the name suggests.

The anti-depressant Prozac has been a blockbuster drug for four decades now. Recent research suggests established beliefs about how it actually works doesn’t hold water, and the vast majority of people who take it do not actually benefit (Economist 2022).

A large-scale effort to replicate 98 psychological studies found that only 39 held up under such scrutiny. And these were studies published in highly respected journals (Baker 2015). This 62% failure rate places a big questionmark on how scientifically based the psych professions really are.

The medical profession has a lot of smart people with overinflated egos, who cannot admit they do not know. If they do not understand, then they blame the patients by labeling them as psychiatric. That was the case for migraines, mitral valve prolapse, stomach ulcers, asthma, hives, sickle-cell anemia, TMJ, eczema, celiac, endometriosis, Parkinson’s, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, interstitial cystitis, Long Covid, chronic back pain, chronic fatigue (CFS/ME) and possibly many others.

The psych camp seems to believe that any doubt should automatically lead to a psych diagnosis.

A journalist in New York was destined for a closed psychiatric ward by a group of psychiatrists. She was only saved by the insistence of her family and one courageous physician who refused to believe she was seriously mentally ill. It turned out she had an autoimmune disease that attacked her brain. Once they figured it out, she made a full recovery (Cahalan 2012). Another woman was locked up in a psychiatric hospital for ten years before they figured it out (Kwon 2025).

Physician Damon Tweedy (2015) tells a story from his days in medical school, where a man was officially diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive because he wanted to lower his blood pressure by improving his diet, instead of using drugs. This happened at an Ivy League teaching hospital.

Even their own kind criticizes the profession’s fundamental methods of diagnosing mental illnesses as lacking scientific support:

[T]he existing diagnostic criteria … are not support by substantial empirical evidence (Lowe 2008).

Another academic stated about psychiatric research:

True talent is threatening because it is frequently associated with independent thinking, which undermines the power structure, while mediocrity assures lifetime commitment (Fava 2020).

Somehow these professions are unwilling to look at their many failures and be a little more cautious about repeating them.

It is with good reason that laws in many countries forbid psychiatrists from forcing people into mental institutions against their will (unless a danger to self or others). That power was misused far too often before.

That makes one wonder how many people with MCS and EHS are today left without proper treatment, and are instead living in a drug-induced fog prescribed by well-meaning but misguided psychiatrists. How many are locked up in institutions, when all they need is clean air, clean water and food they tolerate. Is grandma truly senile, or does she have MCS?

Causing harm

One of the most outspoken promoters of the idea that MCS, EHS, and chronic fatigue (CFS/ME) is “all in their head” reportedly told an audience of more than a hundred physicians that:

There is no reason why they all cannot return to work tomorrow (Sedgwick 2022).

Because of the misperceived illegitimacy of MCS and EHS, health providers, bosses, coworkers, family members and others feel they have license to ignore the sick people’s pleas for a little understanding and accommodation of their needs. The human cost is very, very high.

They are NOT evil

This writer has met two psychiatrists and two clinical psychologists who all had MCS themselves. Three of them had it so mildly they could continue to work their own practices. One assumed her MCS was psychological and used her connections to get the best help. She did that for years, but to no avail. It was only later that she found out about MCS.

These four all keep a low profile with their peers, for good reason.

We must not forget the much good done by mental health professionals. They do help a lot of people with genuine mental health problems. Countless suicides are averted. Countless people are able to live normal lives through psych meds, instead of having to be institutionalized. Perhaps some mass shootings have also been averted.

Most genuinely want to help their patients, and simply are misguided by the echo-chambers of their profession. It seems that the people who actively promote this great mistake are actually few in number.

Opposing views

There are psychiatrists and other physicians who do not consider MCS and EHS psychiatric diseases. They suggest the emotional problems seen in some of the patients are an effect of the illness, and not the cause of it (Davidoff 2000; De Luca 2011; Randolph 1990).

When people do get psychiatric illnesses, they usually get them before the age of 30. In contrast, few people get MCS before they turn 30 (Miller 1999; Katerndahl 2012; Fiedler 1996). We do not have data for EHS, but it too appears to be mostly adult onset.

People with severe MCS or EHS are often forced to live a life in isolation, as they cannot be around other people due to their choices of personal care products, etc. Social isolation by itself is a potent cause of depression (Novotny 2019; Brooks 2020).

It has also been observed that when patients with MCS are fully removed from chemical triggers, their mood and energy levels often improve (Bertchler 1985; Randolph 1990; Rea 1984).

That removal of chemical exposures is helpful is one of the diagnostic criteria for MCS (Consensus 1999).

For a much more detailed discussion of why the psychiatric model doesn’t work, see: (Davidoff 1994; Ashford 1998: ch 4 & 8).

The foxhole test

There is an aphorism that there are no atheists in a foxhole. Likewise, there are few people with MCS or EHS who believe it is “all in your head.” That includes physicians and mental health professionals.

In a just world, all the skeptics should have to endure a month of the disease. Then they can convince themselves that they are simply wrong.

Those who have staked their reputation on their denial may need six months to be convinced.

One could argue that those who have keenly campaigned against the acceptance, and thus really hurt a lot of people, deserve to get it for life. But that would be too cruel a punishment.

More information

For referenced descriptions of MCS and EHS, go to www.eiwellspring.org/intromenu.html.

For more articles discussing the controversies around MCS and EHS, including why provocation studies fail, go to www.eiwellspring.org/controversy.html.

References

The list of references is at www.eiwellspring.org/edu/Why_psychiatrists_wrong_reference.html

2024