Simon Wessely on Covid-19

MSEsperanza said:


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https://twitter.com/ClrBlwrs/status/1278572045077446657

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/why-reassuring-the-public-may-not-be-the-best-way-to-end-lockdown
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It's amazing how these "experts" on human behavior hold caricatural beliefs about human behavior. As if it is a foreign concept to them, studied from so far away they can't resolve anything. This tripe is shallow and pedantic. Whoever thinks this is worthy advice? Seriously?!
When the dentist says “This won’t hurt”, our anxiety spikes and we expect pain, which in turn increases the likelihood of feeling pain, due to heightened attention and hypervigilance.
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Uh... what? No. Not even close. Where do they even get this stuff? First there's a whole range of behavior and most people are not fragile toddlers. Wessely is aware that most people have no problem watching the needle go into their arm without dissembling into hysteria, right? Doesn't appear so.
Instead it is better to mobilise the public to tolerate the uncertainty of the current situation and encourage them to gradually return to the workplace, use public transport, or send their children back to school.
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OK get these dangerous fools away from public platforms. ASAP.
 
Recent work from my own university, King’s College London, has shown that 44 per cent of the UK population is “suffering” under the lockdown, with the vast majority of this group feeling very anxious and depressed and a significant proportion sleeping badly. The case for new measures and messaging to reassure this half of the country that their safety will not be compromised once the all-clear is sounded therefore seems logical on the surface. But look deeper, and the case seems a lot less wise.

There is considerable evidence about the impact of reassuring anxious individuals and anxious populations. It shows that this approach generally doesn’t work, particularly once the quantifiable danger has passed. Reassurance offers transient false comfort that rapidly fades; when unwarranted, it promotes distress – particularly in relation to health-related anxiety.
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Sounds like confusion. They seem to be lumping anxiety with different causes together, then treat them as health anxiety, then say reassuring people with health anxiety doesn't work. Of course it doesn't because you're abusing the concept to deny actual illness by labelling it a health anxiety. Since telling sick people that they're not really sick doesn't help them get better but actually makes them feel misunderstood, reassuring doesn't work.

The anxiety, if one wishes to look at the problem in this way, should be treated by addressing the causes. One important cause is that the virus is not under control in the UK (I may not be up to date), another is the economic impact on vulnerable people.
 
strategist said:
One important cause is that the virus is not under control in the UK (I may not be up to date)
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Well yes exactly.

“The case for new measures and messaging to reassure this half of the country that their safety will not be compromised once the all-clear is sounded therefore seems logical on the surface. But look deeper, and the case seems a lot less wise.”

Erm what? Our safety is compromised because in fact, despite the govt trying to say otherwise and opening things up, a deadly virus has been allowed to continue to run through the U.K population. Are they now trying to gaslight us into believing there isn’t coronavirus currently spreading and being handled atrociously in the U.K.?! And I can’t see that changing for quite a while.

and as you said, there’s so many reasons to be anxious. So many people have lost jobs, there isn’t any proper income security and furlough is about to be laid off. People on universal credit are now to be forced to go into job centres, despite Covid still at large in the community, or else face threat of sanctions and their benefits being stopped. And etc.
 
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I am not sure this is really irony. It is the same as before - telling people what they should do without evidence.

Before we get people exercising" need "to be sure it’s going to be safe. We need proper evaluation of cardiac and respiratory function" &. "take things slowly and in a paced measure.”

How do we know what we need yet?
How down know how to take it?
How do we know what is meant by 'in a paced measure'?

Why doesn't he just admit that he has no idea and never has.
 
Here is one article where Mrs Wessely uses the "I overcame"...statement. There was an article in Pulse about the same time, but I can no longer accesss it:

MEDICAL OBSERVER OPINION
As a GP who has overcome coronavirus, here is what I want you to know

Dr Clare Gerada
Dr Gerada is the former chair of the UK RCGP, the co-chair of the NHS Assembly, and is a GP in Lambeth, in London.

2 minutes to read
23rd March 2020


The only souvenir I thought I’d brought back from my recent trip to a conference in New York was a fridge magnet of the Statue of Liberty.

in_bed_with_coronavirus-1202113925.jpg

Barely two days later, I realised I’d brought a lot more.

Tucked somewhere in my body was the developing coronavirus.

The symptoms mimicked those of jet lag: tiredness, headache and feeling ‘out of it’. Subsequently, it delayed my diagnosis.

I put down the dry cough to the long flight home and the effects of rebreathing cabin air. What I couldn’t....
https://www.ausdoc.com.au/opinion/gp-who-has-overcome-coronavirus-here-what-i-want-you-know

Admittedly this was in March, before it was clear that there was Long COVID, but I somehow doubt that she has changed her tune.
 
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