Comments Simon Wessely revisits some of his early work on chronic fatigue syndrome, journal article (2012) Wessely

Was just trawling and saw this, can't see it anywhere else here.

https://www.meassociation.org.uk/20...-fatigue-syndrome-journal-article-march-2012/

 

I think I just knocked myself out on my desk.

 

As they say: Only the future is certain. The past is always changing.

 

So we actually have Wessely to thank for the Chalder Fatigue Scale. Hadn't realised that before. No wonder it's a pile of doo-dah (or s**t if you prefer). Chalder is a piece of work too.

I went to a thing (can't think of word - there were a collection of speakers on CBT) about 20 years ago in London where she was a speaker. Chatted with a few people (attendees) in breaks, they were nearly all CFS clinic types, and they didn't really want to talk to me, prob cos I was so anti-Chalder. It was a waste of time really, not just the cost of the meeting, but the cost of the train too!

 

PS no wonder the Chalder Fatigue Scale is so carp since it was the Weasel "invented" it.

 

TL;DR: guy gets easily confused by superficial similarities. At a distance, sleeping, syncope and coma look exactly the same. It takes a fool to insist upon closer examination that the superficial-similarities-at-a-distance are a better explanation than the obvious differences.

Though Wessely inventing the early CFQ explains a lot of things, especially why it seems to be a tool often used in IAPT despite being utterly useless beyond fishing for a specific answer to irrelevant questions.

And this guy is at the top of the psychiatric profession. Really making a strong case that it is a superfluous specialty that needs to be taken down several notches.

 

This is the paper he is referring to in his 2012 comments:

http://www.simonwessely.com/Downloads/Publications/CFS/6.pdf

I've just read it after following @Sly Saint's comments on this thread:

https://www.s4me.info/threads/perso...rome-1999-wood-and-wessely.11524/#post-204991

 

Yes, if you searched the scientific literature with the brief to find three adjacent paragraphs with as many flaws in as you could, I suspect my excerpt above would be a fair candidate.

 

I made the mistake of doing a Google search to try to find out if Wessely is esteemed by his psychiatrist peers (those not involved with his CFS/ME work) or whether they are appropriately embarrassed 'by association' (sharing the same profession). This led me to the following link:

https://www.meassociation.org.uk/20...fessor-simon-wessely-the-times-6-august-2011/

Well, apparantly he is 'dedicated, intelligent and well liked'...

The above interview though, was sickening to read - so much nonsense and distain of patients running through it.

In it he even states that Alzheimer’s and autism are 'psychiatric disorders' . This man's ego knows no bounds - he is completely happy to re-frame any neuro-medical condition - regardless of scientific evidence to the contrary or his own lack of professional expertise in it - to suit his own narrative and agenda, muddying the waters in the process. It appears that he wants to expand the domain of psychiatry to subsume neurological conditions (but not vice versa). Just because a particular neurological condition may cause additional problems in patients that may be helped by behavioural interventions, doesn't therefore make it a 'psychiatric disorder'.

However, the comments section made an interesting read. But why is it only patients calling him out - why aren't his professional peers challenging his unscientific and unevidenced remarks?

 

The nature of the massive power asymmetry between physicians and patients means his colleagues will never be in a position to see who he really is. They are equals, he has little power over them, even in cases where hierarchy actually means he has some. It's as big a difference as your neighbor being a prison guard and being guarded by the same person in a shady prison that doesn't care much about the welfare of its criminal population, a side no one will ever see unless they are unfortunate.

Then again, like most of his like-minded colleagues, he does not seem to grasp the impact of his research. Wessely has hurt millions of people he has never seen or heard about. That's more patients than he would even be able to see in a century if he did nothing but that. He's just closed his eyes to the suffering he built his career on and focused on the awards and knighthood and all the other perks of hurting unseen people who have been disappeared to give the illusion of cutting costs. I don't think he'll ever actually get it and neither will his peers, who have never been in a position where he holds absolute power over their lives without accountability or oversight, as he managed with us.

Even some of the worst people in the world have plenty of admirers. It's all about circumstances.

 

What is the reasoning for sharing these links again, it just raises Search Engine (Google) ranking of the original paper, doing us a deservice. you might want to break the link in a way that if somebody wants to see it, they can copy and paste but a literal link is just not good. I saw a few posts looking at the past.

 

"Why do they hate me? They should be hating themselves!"

 

During my time as a patient representative with the NIHR, more than once I have been in a room full of consultants, mostly surgeons. Hearing their views on psychiatry was, to say the least, interesting. Lets just say, it wasn't exactly positive.

 

I do know that neurologists are looked on as doctors who couldn't quite cut it as neurosurgeons.

Years ago I read about an activist who was sitting next to SW at a conference. He asked her "Why do they hate me?" and she answered "Simon, do you ever listen to yourself?"

 

Yes, the meetings (like NICE ones) were confidential, so I have to be careful what I say. However, it helped my development to be part of these (sometimes private) discussions between committee members.

 

Direct links will be tracked back to this thread.

 

It wasn't just 'moaning'. Research proposals were actively rejected on the basis of committee discussion. I can't publically say anymore than that.