"Time for Unrest": ME article by Nathalie Wright

ah, so the victim here is him

 

Fair play, SW has put his take on the article as it pertains to himself out there. Moving on..

 

Of course. It can't possibly be us. I see he's been out at dawn buying up cans of distemper from B&Q but all the white wash at his fingertips can't hide what he and his cabal have actually done. Strange that he has so little insight he still thinks he can talk himself out of it!

 

He's venturing into a detailed response for once, so he must be rattled. The only detail he responds to is of course of his choosing, and in a way that shuts down any dialogue on the subject. That's a pity, because there are a lot of other questions people would like a detailed response from him on, and a continuing dialogue, rather than a document thrown from the bunker.

Like all my generation? Ah yes, the Harvey Weinstein defence. Those lessons Wessely's generation were taught about labelling must have come in very handy when he orchestrated the press through the SMC to label PWME as death-threatening militant activists worse than anything Afghanistan had to offer. He's very lucky that those names were only erroneous (in fact a court of law found that there was no evidence for them whatsoever) and not self-fulfilling.

Twenty-five years later we are still in a position where nothing can be done for ME patients, a situation that Wessely and his gang have played a significant role in maintaining. Is it still premature to say so? Is it still a dangerous thing to say? Dangerous for who? Insurance companies? That nothing can be done for ME sufferers is not an "exceedingly common assumption", but an alarm bell and a call for biomedical research. Unfortunately Wessely & co only saw it as a chance to grab territory and build careers.

 

I'm the same generation ..so where was he when we were taught to be ruthlessly honest? Behind the bike sheds?

 

A person could get, probably unreasonably according to some, mildly irked.

 

Poor Wessely, it was all a misunderstanding; he was young, he believed what he was taught about the perils of labelling and he was misquoted by a pesky civil servant.
Of course he's done everything in his power to set the record straight and put things right for PwME since that terrible mix-up, hasn't he? He's been a tireless campaigner for ME rights, benefits and research, he's been our loudest voice, he's our patron fucking saint.

 

Steady on @Wonko, steady on.

 

I think that only people who have suffered as a result of Wessely, and a few others, are aware of his appallingness.

 

It might be time to look up the direct quotes from that almost contemporaneous lecture at which various comments, generally regarded as disobliging, were made.

For the sake of history, one would be glad to have clarification of the intended meanings.

 

I think this is why it's very problematic to level criticism at Wessely without giving context.

The original piece is excellent - but perhaps if I was a layperson, and read SW's response, I'd be inclined to think that he was being fairly reasonable and quoted completely out of context on his work over two decades ago.

The real challenge here doesn't seem to be getting articles that patients agree with (though that is clearly still an issue based on the crap that often pops up on my google alerts), but instead persuading laypeople that there's been some kind of injustice here and that a change (more investment, better research) needs to be made.

How we do that...I'm not entirely sure.

 

I'm sure Wessely has a stock of quotes from the last 25 years that paint him in a good light and allow him to engage in this kind of self-justificatory damage limitation. He's been careful to occasionally say the right thing over the years so that he can always portray himself as on one side of the fence or the other in hindsight.

The trouble for him is that for every favourable quote / action / interpretation he can point to, there are about another hundred quotes / actions which show him for what he is, so it just won't wash. Plus the trouble with PWME is that many of them have had nothing else to do but document, record and remember from their beds. He has created an army of involuntary historians and record-keepers who can show him up for the hypocrite he is every time. And now that journalists are interested, they know where to come. We have a propaganda machine that the SMC can only dream of, plus the added advantage that it's all true. Every time Wessely opens his mouth he puts a couple more feet in it, and more and more people are noticing.

 

And most definitely proved something could be done: by making their lives harder and endorsing treatments that best case made no difference and arguably made their condition much, much worse.

Well done!

ETA - bolding is mine

 

Like this one from EC:

https://www.s4me.info/threads/esthe...upting-your-view-of-me.286/page-16#post-26981

 

This is a key factor. Of all the people best placed to set the record straight, right the wrongs done to PwME, and ensure a much more hopeful future ... it's him! Somehow that doesn't seem likely.

 

Looks to be this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_approach

 

"One of the core principles of the “Recovery Movement”, currently the dominant paradigm in managing long term conditions and disability, is avoiding this."

This is the worst sort of sound bite blather we get these days. Who cares what is a 'dominant paradigm'. Is the right thing to think what it is cool to think? Judging from Wikipedia the 'paradigm' is just endless meaningless drivel of the sort psychologists are good at. Completely devoid of science.

One day Simon Wessely might come to realise he has a problem with understanding real people. He may understand other politicos with a mind set like his own but real ordinary people seem beyond his ken.

 

Not read it in detail, but I suspect that for ME a la SW et al it boils down to PwME properly maintaining their daily dose of GET, and not dropping back to that silly pacing thing they seem to hold in so much store .

 

My feeling is that his real understanding of people is how to manipulate them, and I doubt he will ever care about anything else. I think he missed his calling - politics rather than science.