I am an ME sufferer and have been for 3 years and people like you do us no favours at all, this type of blinkered self indulgent bullshit is exactly the manner in which we’re portrayed in the media. If someone can come over and make me laugh, even if it is about my illness, I’d take that any day of the week over your embarrassing, patronising ‘give them a hug’ ideas.

Were Ricky Gervais’s jokes cheap? Yes. Is this video any better? No.

I can’t think of any incident in which an “ME sufferer” is known to have taken their family for a ride by pretending to be ill. Not one. In fact, people who pretend to be ill usually do so for money, or they seek sympathy from real sufferers by pretending in online forums (as noted in a recent story in the Guardian). On the other hand, I know of quite a number of people who have been seriously ill with ME for years, often since childhood or early adolescence, and in most cases they had no reason to prefer being ill to their former (often very happy and active) lives. You would think that someone would get bored with this after a while, wouldn’t you?

The reason cancer or heart disease patients do not “go ballistic” is because nobody claims that cancer or heart disease are not real illnesses. People with ME often find that doctors disbelieve them even when they are very obviously very ill. This is why they are sensitive about it. As for the comment about the “king’s jester”, there is a big difference between jokes at the expense of the rich and powerful and those at the expense of the poor and the sick.

It is a crying shame that Ricky Gervais was shouted down rather than opening the debate on the abuse of people’s trust and compassion and, frequently, elderly people who can ill afford it by people pretending to have ME.

Why do heart or cancer patients or sufferers of severe depression not go ballistic whenever it becomes known that some hypochondriac had falsely claimed to suffer a heart attack, depression or some form of cancer? This behaviour of ME patients seems to be unique to their condition.

Usually we have little compassion for the victims of fraud, because usually they were expecting to get something out of it, drawn into the scam through some flaw of their own, whether greed or acute stupidity.

However, the victims of people who falsely claim to have ME, were duped because they were compassionate and trusting: elderly parents, caring friends, whose every last drop of sympathy and compassion is squeezed out over years to offer free accommodation and a free pass in everything because oh-oh, stress worsens the condition. The patient must be relieved of all stress: no work, no normal interaction with people (which would involve telling someone when he’s behaved badly) to avoid stress. Lets get some awareness and education going to prevent/reduce this kind of abuse of parents, family and friends. All the ME awareness campaigns enjoin people to “believe them, support them”. Pity Ricky Gervais was shouted down.

Ricky Gervaise is showing his true colours now. He loves “persuading” a friend to allow himself to be tied up with sellotape and laughing hysterically while doing it. He even uses his appearance on Comic Relief to ridicule the programme’s efforts and promote his latest dvd. People laugh because they think he’s joking.

Sadly, so much tv now is devoted to ridiculing and humiliating the participants. Jerry Springer, Weakest Link, Big Brother etc. Let’s have a “secret camera” show where comics are hauled up before TV bosses and told they are being banned from TV because of their offensive humour.

School bullies pick on students who are “different”. Others join in so as not to be associated with the victim. Do you remember the insulting words? Fatty, skinny, beanpole, short***, 4 eyes, pizzaface, braceface, badbreath and so on. Did you notice? We all fall in to one of those categories! So we may escape today but there’s always tomorrow.

There’s an old quotation from Nazi Germany. “When they came for the Jews, I did nothing. When they came for the gypsies and the disabled, I did nothing. When they came for me, there was nobody left to help me.”

It’s time to educate the masses that tomorrow they could be on the receiving end.