Blog: "The Death Threat Myth Exposed", Jennie Spotila

don't know about that, but I'm going to repost Jennie's article.

 

You're right of course, but it raises the question, why bother making up threats in the first place if they already had perfectly fine precedents? The professional relationship between McClure and Wessely lends some credence to the hypothesis that at least part of it was a singular coordinated effort. I've also to this day not seen a single proof of death threats in general, but maybe I'm missing something?

I am also reminded of this statement by Richard Bentall. His research preceded the publication of PACE by ~ a decade, so clearly this happened independently. He later in the thread admitted they were joking, but it's clear to see how easily insults, ad homs, etc. are blown of proportion if you just try hard enough. The research Bentall conducted was nothing short of worthy of the crassest insults, what with his contribution to the myth that support groups hinder recovery, etc. Flaming researchers is poor use of our time and emotional energy, but it's also perfectly understandable why patients might get furious over this egregious misallocation of research funding. But that alone does not a death threat make, let alone a credible one.

 

that's interesting, I hadn't seen that. My thing with the tribunal is that what was found gets repeatedly overstated. In terms of investigators, it applies only to the PACE authors, not to Wessely. And it seems that Wessely did receive some kind of serious threat that amounted to a death threat. The rest I attribute to things like what Jennie showed--exaggerations across multiple retellings that then get frozen as reality in news articles.

 

What evidence is there for that though? To my knowledge the only evidence put forward is his word.

 

As far as I'm aware there was never a police case filed in relation to wessely. If he put in a complaint shouldn't there be a case number? Someone might correct me if I'm wrong.

 

I am not aware of any formal reports to the Police. When Horton claimed his wife had received threats on their house phone, he seemed to avoid answering the direct question of whether or not they had reported this to the police for formal investigation.

Similarly when Crawley claimed she had had to consult the Police after @dave30th had had the effrontery to actually ask her a question in the Q&A section of a public lecture, it was not clear what had been reported to the Police and if they felt it warranted any investigation under a specific crime number.

Often what we hear of these threats are reports of what other people said. The only published threatening letter turned out to be a journalist’s mock up intended to be illustrative rather than an actual letter or email that was sent, even though I seem to recollect Crawley then used that mock up in a talk falsely asserting it was a real letter.

There will undoubtedly have been a number of intemperate online comments, I have certainly read comments that were less than polite, there are likely even some that might warrant reporting to the Police, but it remains unclear if there were threats that left researchers reasonably in fear for their own or their families’ safety and required formal Police investigation. Certainly nothing seems to have resulted in any arrests or formal charges.

Personally I would like to see a list of the public claims by researchers of such threats, then a reporter asking the people making the claims what exactly was reported to the Police and the Police being asked what advice they gave and what official action they had undertaken.

 

I think that journalists letter mock up, as far as I recollect, hadn't even been to Crawley. It might have been supposedly a message to Wessely.

 

I was dozing to Radio 4 one morning and up popped SW with proof of a death threat. He read it out on air. It didn't sound like a death threat to me. Subsequently it was said to be part of a Dylan song but I am too brain dead to find it.

 

Yes! I had a conversation a few years ago on a now-defunct forum in which a group of members who made it clear that they hated people with ME, were discussing about how horrible those militant ME sufferers were for sending Wessely death threats. I asked them to provide documented evidence of such. It went very quiet for a while, then one member piped up with a screenshot of a post someone had made on some other forum (they didn't say where), which they said was proof of a death threat against Wessely.

The screenshot said something along the lines of Wessely having made life hard for people with ME, followed with:

They triumphantly told me that that was a death threat towards Wessely, and apparently he had seen that post.

They then became quite deflated when I explained that far from being a death threat, that was simply a verse from an old Bob Dylan song, Masters of War. There was a stunned admission from the forum members that they had never heard of the song (in one of the very few occasions in which I'm glad to be as old as I am, I'm old enough to remember the song, and they were not), and the subject was quietly dropped amidst much egg on faces.

 

Crawley gave a lecture where she talk about abuse she had experienced - in which she included the outreach from patients to the likes of Barnardos and the NSPCC to try to stop the trial of the LP on children as young as eight - while in the background there was a projection of a death threat letter made from torn up newspapers.

She never said she received it but the fact that it was there made it seem as if she had.

It was actually a mock up that was used on the cover of the Sunday times magazine to illustrate an article about how bad things were for SW. The wording was from a phone call he claimed to have received which was not recorded or verified.

ME activists being abusive was a policy discussed by a group including the SMC. I can't remember the context, bad memory being a draw back for us not shared by healthy people, but the Tymes Trust were inadvertently included when an email of the minutes was distributed.

 

Yes, we really must catch and lock up all of the members of the militant terrorist activist organisations, the NSPCC and Bernados.

Their behaviour, in organising legal surveys to 'document' and protest against medically pointless 'medical' abuse of children is completely unacceptable in a free society, where some people interpret this as meaning free to do whatever they like, to children and the chronically ill, without disclosure or any risk of censure.

 

She did indeed say she received it! Certainly in her TEDx talk in December 2017, which was briefly on YouTube but was set to Private (still is) after numerous critical comments, but I happened to have downloaded it from YouTube while it was accessible, and still have the copy. At 9:23 minutes into the video, she says:

"This is an email that I got a few years ago. It was used on the front cover of the Sunday Times to discuss the research environment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I still laugh at the idea that someone was going to cut my balls off. [Esther smirks, audience laughs] Does make you wonder! [laughs] But most of it isn't very funny."

For legal/rights etc reasons I don't think I should share my copy of the video, but if anyone knows of a copy re-posted elsewhere, you can confirm it.

(ETA: There's a copy of the magazine cover here in case anyone's memory needs refreshing)

https://twitter.com/user/status/944263868443791361

 

In the TEDx talk she says of that 'cut your balls off' image: ""This is an email that I got a few years ago. It was used on the front cover of the Sunday Times to discuss the research environment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I still laugh at the idea that someone was going to cut my balls off.". At 9.20: https://pwme.uk/EC/Crawley TEDx.mp4

I think that was after the graphic designer (Gill) who created it contacted her to raise concern about how she was using the image:

I think it was this talk that led to a patient contacting the graphic designer: https://www.s4me.info/threads/non-h...ephenson-and-crawley.19061/page-2#post-326219

To me it sounds like she is saying that she received it there too:

 

Aha, good job on finding a still-online copy of the video!

 

With any good cause there is always a very small minority of extremist outliers who behave stupidly, sometimes very stupidly. Most rational people understand this. But some detractors of that cause willingly exploit the behaviour of such people as a way to smear campaign the cause as a whole, and the vast majority of decent people who strive for it.

I can appreciate that if someone were genuinely being targeted in such a way, then it might be harder for them to see the wood for the trees. But patterns of behaviour by these people strongly suggests that is not the case here.

 

Wow, that is even worse than I thought of her!

I can't watch videos and find them upsetting anyway. Good for you and Esther 12 for taking the trouble for the rest of us.

 

The thing that gets me about this particular group of professionals claiming 'harassment' and what they perceive as 'death threats', is that they're psychiatrists (except Crawley of course, but she obviously buys into a psychiatric approach to ME/CFS). Badly-behaved patients, threats and suchlike, go with the territory. I worked in a psych unit for several years and saw psychiatrists having to cope with all manner of threatening behaviour, sometimes physical, sometimes directed at us admin staff as well. I'll never forget an incident in which a patient stormed out of the building saying he was going home to get his shotgun and come back and shoot all of us, and the police were called to intercept him when he returned. That's real death threat, not a Bob Dylan song.

And on the other hand we have Wessely and co who chose to 'specialise' in ME/CFS as junior psychiatrists and seem to have only worked with ME/CFS patients. The impression I get is that they have lived a cushy professional life dealing only with physically ill people and as a result are speaking from a very sheltered and cossetted professional position. I doubt they would last a day where I worked. Hence, we get Wessely saying he feels safer in war-torn Afghanistan (where he is also cossetted and sheltered from actual fighting) than he feels when he hears physically disabled patients criticise his theories which have harmed them. The whole scenario is just so bizarre that it seems unreal.