Who is Simon Wessely?

And if Simon and his mates had been right, then undoing the symptoms and therefore undoing the condition would be easy peasey. And well easy to demonstrate objectively.

Instead as a group they slid into blaming the patients for not engaging or trying, rather than think perhaps we are blowing hot air out of where the sun doesn't shine.

The drip, drip of patient non compliance etc just feeds into the medical system and allows hate and disgust to fester.

All about them and their careers. Patients (especially non compliant ones eg. ones who don't 'recover' via their methods) are an inconvenience getting in the way of their day. I bet many patients smiled politely, told him and his mates what they wanted to hear so that they could get as far away from him and his colleagues as possible.

 

Yes, while the Royal Free epidemic was eventually classed as hysteria, by the 1980s it was being taken seriously. The likes of the Behans, Eleanor Bell and Dr Ho Yen were doing research and there was a feeling that it was a genuine, organic disease and the patients deserved to be treated the same way as any other.

There was an excitement in the air that answers would be found then suddenly all this nonsense became mixed in.

 

That deceit held on for a while with the hanging idea that severity of initial illness could be the main factor in chronicity, but Long Covid has completely debunked this. We just never could tell for sure until recently. It's just annoying that debunked assumptions make zero difference to long-held myths. I guess that will hold as long as the line about how LC is "unprecedented" and "completely new" does.

This is really the most annoying thing in the last few years, how this is 100% like politics, that facts are completely irrelevant, long-held myths can be debunked in full and it just has zero impact, the lies hold firm. Largely because none of the assumptions are material to this, second entirely to the underlying belief system. Which is exactly how not to science.

 

@rvallee @chrisb @Joan Crawford

Dr Ho-Yen's paper is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1371214/

The PMC fulltext article contains a link to Wessely et al.'s response.

hth

 

Amazing that we are still at the exact same place 30+ years later, still a "debate" over interpretation of facts, with some who understand, others who don't, and the patients being neglected out of it.

Amazingly awful, that is.

 

Awful is not a big enough word. It took me 17 years to be diagnosed with ME, finally hope and not abandoned. Then a few short years later it was suddenly renamed CFS which did not match my symptoms at all and it has been one long road of indignation, opening the paper and discovering a new set of lies, no treatment and little hope. Plus a bewilderment that no one could see through it all.

The last few years have brought outsiders who have seen through the lies but it is too late for me to have a life.

 

Never noticed this. They basically cancel out. Like giving an award to someone for solving a disaster, while simultaneously rewarding the person responsible for starting it. Makes sense.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1430834611605676032

 

Moved post

Wessely has been playing the good guy for a long time. Look at this letter (https://www.s4me.info/threads/gover...lishing-the-bps-model.2319/page-4#post-256305) where he says it's not hysteria or malingering. He also said somewhere (his website I think) that he was referred ME patients with a note saying "This patient has ME, there is nothing wrong with her", and judges the GP for not believing ME was real. Read his CFS story here (https://www.simonwessely.com/index.php/cfs-personal-story/).

 

JAC - Reappointment of five Commissioners (Reappointment)
Announced
Appointing Department: Ministry of Justice

The following Commissioners have been reappointed and their tenures will commence on 1 September 2020:

Mathangi Asokan (District Judge), Judicial Commissioner;
Emir Feisal (non-legal judicial), Judicial Commissioner;
Jane Furniss, Lay Commissioner;
Andrew Kennon, Lay Commissioner; and
Sir Simon Wessely, Lay Commissioner.

Date: 14/07/2020

 

Apparently he was first appointed in September 2017Sir Simon Wessely – Judicial Appointments Commission

 

Oh b*gger, not having a good week!

 

Found it: https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/83/1/4.full

 

This seems to be an orphaned page on the Swiss Re website; I only came across it on google, not from within Swiss Re's site. But there may be a link I have missed.

Does SW have, or has he in the past had, a specific relevance to Swiss Re? Apologies if it is all well known, and I've simply overlooked / forgotten something. Or is this simply a profile that does not imply any particular connection to Swiss Re?

https://www.swissre.com/profile/Simon_Wessely/ep_2d4f95

 

He spoke at a conference they organised on mental health, keynoting with an “overview and update” of MH. The presentation he delivered is no longer available on the conference mini-site, but neither are those of the other speakers.

I’ve produced conferences in my time and I’ve been married to a conference director for years: once you have someone signed up who looks senior and has all the trappings of respectability, you don’t go too far to search for skeletons in their closet. There are deadlines to hit. So it would be unfair to boycott Swiss Re (should you have a large reinsurance pot to play with) just because he got one gig there.

 

It's Profs Peter White and Michael Sharpe's affiliation with Swiss Re we are more concerned about, but it's worth noting any work for Swiss Re done by Wessely.

 

Charles Shepherd was taught in the 1970's that ME was "hysterical nonsense" so I'm confused about the time line. When exactly was ME taken seriously? Didn't the media in the 1980's dub it "Yuppie Flu"?

 

I am not feeling up to checking exact dates so it went roughly like this. There were always epidemics of what was referred to as atypical polio which were probably caused by another enterovirus. The Royal Free epidemic was classed as one of these. The doctors involved saw it as a proper disease and carried on treating long term survivors. There were other local outbreaks going on at the same time with many of them called by the name of where they occurred.

During the epidemic in Adelaide, primates were infected from patients and also became sick. It was not just women, one outbreak was in and army barracks in Switzerland. After the polio vaccine was introduced the character of outbreaks changed so they were more localised.

General medical attitudes were often dismissive, polio had been conquered so no one wanted to think another virus was causing long term ill health but basically it was a curiosity if anyone thought about it at all. There was still interest and I believe some international conferences were held. It was in the late 60s that ME was defined as part of mainstream medicine.

When McEvedy presented his thesis (in 1970?) it was reported in Time magazine within a few months which is unheard of. The only conclusion is that insurance companies in the US did not want to pay out for a long term disease. It also played into the misogyny that was prevalent in some circles in the 70s as well as a feeling that infections had been conquered by a combination of vaccines and antibiotics and became dogma extremely quickly alongside the idea that most disease was caused by psychology nor by viruses.

In the UK some researchers became interested and papers were published which showed that it did not just occur in epidemics but sporadically and virologists began looking at it seriously. I think that was the early 80s when it was seen as the coming thing in medical research.

Then there was AIDS which cost the insurance people a fortune. When there was an outbreak at Lake Tahoe in 1985 the CDC ignored all the expertise in ME and said it was a new illness they called it chronic fatigue syndrome and doomed us all.

The BPS people took over in the UK and all connection with exercise was lost. Stephen Strauss of the CDC ent round the US giving talks on CFS where he said it was common among women who wanted to be helped out of their cars. It was said to be an "illness of people with first class aspirations but second class abilities" or, my favourite, "an affliction of middle aged women with psychosexual problems." Yuppy flu was almost endearing compared to the rest.

So here we are. The last few years have become hopeful again but I can't bring myself to believe things will change though I dearly hope so.

 

Yup @Mithriel. Yuppie flu was a okay. Not too personal not too perverted. Also had the advantage that it didn’t really exist. Not outside of media as far as I can tell, though I wasn’t there for it’s creation so can’t be sure.

It is too hard to hope at this point. I am with you there.