Anik, thanks for your interest (though we may be cafe'd).
There is a huge political scandal surounding ME. Basically, although it is recognised, and has been since '69, by the WHO, classified as G 93.3 - a serious neurological disease, it is not recognised by official health service (except for Scotland, but even then, only since last September).
It isn't recognised, because it's a lot cheaper for insurance agencies to pay out for psychological illnesses than it is for organic disease - payments are a lot less.
So what is done in practise is to mix the diagnoses up with those of "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome", which is no more than a mish-mash of symptoms - and can have many causes, from depression to cancer treatment.
CFS is also a bundle of symptoms which come along with ME.
So, mainstream medicine refuses to recognise any of the proper scientific research which folk have managed to do - mostly funded by charities, because the MRC (here anyway) will only fund psychological research - not scientific research. The chap who is in "charge" of all the mainstream research and is governmental advisor about it, is directly involved financially with the insurance companies who would have to pay out more if ME was taken as an organic disease. Interestingly, he's also the chap who is directly involved with the denial of GWS, and has recently published a paper saying that veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq do not have PSTD. No, no, they've all just got alcohol problems.
The government refuse to tackle the MRC over research allocations, and the chap officially in charge of ME stuff, gets allocated all the research money by his partner - who sits on the MRC and gives it to him.
Also mainstream medicine has a tendency to be about 10 years behind research knowledge.
My stats come from real, scientific research. Yes, suicide is a major cause of death in ME. So is cancer. The average age of death for somebody with ME and cancer is 47. The average age of death from cancer in folk without ME, I believe is about 63. The overall average of the cutting life short by 25% comes from averaging all the early deaths from means related to ME - including suicide and cancer as well as from major organ failure caused directly by the ME itself.
Do you want references to the papers? I can dig them out.