Chronic fatigue is a real disease

Also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, the disease causes patients to experience extreme and painful exhaustion.

The documentary has won numerous major awards including the Sundance Film Festival Best Documentary Editing Award and has been selected for an Academy Award nomination.

The film is a true-life documentary about a young woman, Jennifer Brea, who was doing her doctorate at Princeton University in New Jersey but had to stop her studies after being diagnosed with ME.

She chronicles her struggles with the disease and discovers hundreds of other people who suffer from ME worldwide.

She interviews all of them from her bed via Skype as she is too weak to leave her house.

Retha Viviers, a ME patient and the founder of the ME/CFS Foundation, features in the film.

She said doctors are not properly educated about the disease and the film supported her claims and stated that universities deliver thousands of doctors every year and most of them have never heard of ME.

Leigh-Ann Evans, an ME patient and Morehill resident, said it is necessary to raise awareness about ME as people believe the illness does not exist.

“In the beginning I felt forgotten, but now I feel ignored,” she said.

She said her symptoms include “bone crushing fatigue” and said she experiences “air hunger” where her lungs are physically too tired to fulfill their function.

She added that symptoms differ from person to person.

The documentary touches on socio-economic challenges to help people understand and cure the disease.

There is no concrete diagnostic or determined biological cause for the disease.

The stigma around the disease is also a major threat to progress, according to the film.

In 2013, a young woman from Denmark called Karina Hansen was taken against her will from her home by national authorities as they classified her as mentally ill.

The Danish woman was bedridden due to ME and authorities thought she was being held captive by her parents.

They did not see their ill daughter for two years before she was released in 2016.

If you think you might have ME, visit the ME/CFS Facebook-page for more information.

Also read: #knowyourbenoni – Young professional aspires to be a media mogul