Biopsychosocial models of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) posit that personality and stress have predisposing and perpetuating roles in the persistent and unexplained fatigue that characterizes this functional somatic syndrome [1]. Studies indicate that many CFS patients are characterized by an achievement-oriented and perfectionistic personality, and that such tendencies coupled with self-criticism drive these individuals to work beyond the point of exhaustion in a way that may initiate or perpetuate chronic fatigue [2]. Research has differentiated between the role of holding high personal standards (standards perfectionism) and having self-critical thoughts about trying to achieve ideal standards (maladaptive perfectionism) in CFS [2]. The latter has been linked to poor outcomes including heightened stress sensitivity [3]. Although research indicates that CFS patients use maladaptive coping strategies more than healthy controls [4], it is unknown whether this is true relative to other chronic illness groups. Because maladaptive perfectionism is linked to poor coping responses [5], we examined perfectionism dimensions and maladaptive coping styles in CFS patients compared with healthy controls and two other chronic illness groups.

Participants were drawn from a larger sample of community-dwelling adults from the USA or Canada (n= 980) who completed an anonymous online survey on personality and health after providing informed consent. We selected individuals who indicated on a medical checklist that included 13 different chronic health conditions that they had been diagnosed by a medical professional with CFS, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or fibromyalgia (FM)/arthritis for 3 subsamples. The remaining participants were screened for the presence of other chronic diseases, leaving a final healthy sample of 564 subjects, which was divided into 6 random samples of comparable size to the illness groups, one of which was randomly chosen as the healthy control group.