Who is Simon Wessely?

You are far kinder than me.
I am afraid I lay the responsibility for the loss of what should have been a brilliant career, squarely at the door of this man. Decent research was slowly starting to be done in the 1980's and then he came along with his Beard and McVeady misogynistic psycho babble guff and persuaded the medical profession that we were all just lazy hypochondriacs. Worse still he groomed the media, and used them to constantly brief against the patients. I can't think of any other doctors that have done this to patients.
I came top in my year at Cambridge and was all set for a brilliant career. Instead, I have rotted away behind closed doors. Meanwhile Wessley, who I believe also went to Cambridge, has been awarded the glittering prizes and a knighthood, for a career built on the backs of our suffering. As far as I am concerned the man has no redeeming qualities, and I really hope that I can live long enough to get to read his obituary in the paper and leave a comment.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, as they say.
His legacy will be a steaming pile of dung.

 

They are his theories because he has embraced modernised Victorian prejudice and made it palatable to liberal modern sensibility, and he has spread them far and wide and profited from them. Yes the insurance industry is sort of behind all this, yes Sharpe and White deserve a lot of blame too, but Wessley has done the most to ensure we are seen as bad hysterical lazy mad nutters whose account of their own illness is not to be listened to by anyone. Who has spread the stigma and harm the furthest.

 

One thing I don't understand is how he managed this influence. There is this clip from 1996, a TV news segment that is basically "Wessely wants chronic fatigue syndrome", when he was pushing for ME to be memory-holed and replaced by the generic fluff.

And in 1996, really, who the fuck is Simon Wessely? How does this random no-name psychiatrist at the beginning of his career ever get a TV news segment framed in a way that is basically reserved for highly eminent scientists with a long distinguished career? He was a nobody at the time. He was not the Wessely who became president of two professional associations yet. That would have been just a few years after he completed his MD.

For sure his career and influence were pushed by others with the kind of influence to get their opinion on TV news unedited. Probably the likes of White and Aylward, and other influential people with a fetish for psychosomatic ideology.

That was definitely not normal, very much in the line of PR pushes like big companies who need something to happen get through in the media.

 

He has been uniquely influential in the anglosphere, both in government circles and in the general medical and popular culture, in portraying us as subhuman. As a result of his actions, I’ve been stomped on like a piece of dung and crushed by so-called medical professionals, so-called friends, family, coworkers, the media etc. Because of propaganda spread by him and the likes of him, my colleagues (all of whom are healthcare workers) think that people with ME/CFS are vermin.

 

I suppose the question is, what can we do in an organised, coordinated manner to get the message out about him? It would double as a campaign to get the message out about ME ofc.

 

x10

 

I see that. But what is the solution? Be silent and allow them to slander us in perpetuity incase we are misrepresented? This is the person who has destroyed so many lives. We just let him retire with every honour the state can throw at him without even trying to get justice or our voices heard?

And @Trish I really hope you are wrong there. I think there may well be a biomarker in the next few years. I choose to hope too because the idea of living like this forever knowing this man's theories and my own ignorance put me here is unbearable and I can't mentally cope with it.

 

The only solution is sustained and large-scale funding for biomedical research. Simply refuting their arguments and pushing back against them will never lead to a lasting victory - many of the major BPS figures are still very active and vocal following the PACE trial, which was as big a public humiliation as most scientists will ever experience.

That research funding will ensure that, in the long term, their views are discredited.

 

I was thinking similar the other day - we almost need something as a campaign along the lines of 'looking at it from fresh' that draws a clear line that the old stuff was just made-up nonsense.

And the fact that we still have a silly situation where the correct guidelines are ME/CFS (rather than CFS/ME for a reason) and yet all of the coding and terms that any GP would write has to be chronic fatigue syndrome is farcical. Quite simply it doesn't matter how much you point people to the correct term and ergo away from the wrong guidelines if every step of the system requires someone to write and repeat the term CFS and chronic fatigue syndrome (rule of advertising 'hear it 7 times', rule of brainwashing 'get people to say it 7 times')

Once we are standing back and looking at the 'entity' of what was created as some 'baggaged dystopia' then it is more possible to lay it at the feet of the creators and others see it for what it is.

Currently they are thriving on the lack of clarity that all those without ME or CFS are getting bathed in.

Something like 'start afresh' (that really isn't a good term, because it sounds like we are making up from a fight with no real change, rather than basically 'you got the whole thing wrong... now listen to what the condition is and drop everything you think you know') needs to involve basically asking all materials to be done from scratch with decent protocols that involve qualified patients. And asks all staff to choose whether they are up for working for something completely new in new ways or are wedded to pretending they do that whilst recycling the old. Then people might see the distance and difference.

 

Probably true, but not enough for me. If we get fixed they'll simply move on to the next thing. This thing will happen to people again and again until their kingdom comes crashing down. There has to be some sort of counter against the entire narrative of their brand of religious zeal being a cure for anything.

 

Precisely why we as a community cannot simply ignore him and the other bps researchers. He and the others have too much of an influence on everything. They campaign to thwart progress behind the scenes (remember ranty person on the nice guidelines).

Perhaps an open letter listing all of the things he has said like the post earlier in this thread, to the organisation that got him to speak on medical ethics would be appropriate in this instance.

I am too severe to do any of this myself. Again proving my earlier point about bps being self defending.

P.s. I'm going to take another break from this forum, all the best everyone!

 

Who is Simon Wessely? He could be my next door neighbour! He could be some nobody you meet on the street. In that his "medical" conception of ME does not come from medical knowledge, it’s just a simple common assumption that tired people can push through their fatigue if they just tried. Or some variation on that. He incarnates this lay idea and masquerades it as science.

Humans haves a long history of believing in all sorts of magical powers of the mind. With such powers the mind can surely make the body sick too. You have an ulcer? Might it be your stressed mind causing this? (the guy next door's answer). Then science comes along and discovers a culprit bacteria…

His influence sticks because he promotes ideas so many humans are spontaneously prone to believe anyways without having read a single bit of medical literature. I have met so many Simon Wessely's in my life.

Of course the popularity of his ideas within the medical field , which is tied to interests of all kinds, careers and reputations, health insurance industry, etc, turns this lay idea into huge concrete problems for our lives, for research, for treatments. But even without those vested interests, his ideas would stick no less, as mere incarnations of ordinary prejudices.

"The banality of Simon Wessely", to paraphrase Hannah Arendt...

 

Agreed. It’s like a sort of populism or politics rather than being medicine really. And it’s definitely just bigotry and about pushing that through propaganda to try and make it seem ok or logical or normalise it just by getting into peoples minds first.

it absolutely needs to be shown up as the delusional thinking that it is and as dirty bigotry. And done so constantly and precisely

as scientific psychology was set up for it needs to be hounded out as a fake subject/ideology based on showing it up as flawed and without basis and metaphorically catching those doing it with their pants down. But this time somehow managing to put protections in that keep it out so (also as psychology predicted) when it just rebrands itself and comes back again it doesn't get away with just setting up shop as a subject with no regulations etc.

it’s sick stuff really

 

Experimental psychology well understood fifty years ago that open label trials with subjective outcome measures were inherently unreliable, and as I have pointed before the main proponents of the BPS approach to ME from Wessely to White to Chalder to Crawley are not research psychologists but rather people with various medical or medical related backgrounds. As a psychology undergraduate getting on for half a century ago I clearly understood that concepts such as ‘conversion disorders’ were inherently unscientific.

Medicine rather than psychology is the source of this snake oil. Just as Freud was a medical doctor who deliberately abandoned the experimental method as too restrictive, researchers like Wessely have diverted into mythology and beliefs. Though I do agree that scientific psychology, though not the origin of this medical belief system, it is at fault for standing back and allowing this pseudoscience to prosper.

Also though Wessely is a high profile devotee, it is important to remember he is part of a larger movement where medicine and government policy combined. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time (or from our view point, the wrong place at the wrong time) when adopting the misnamed bio psychosocial approach to long term disabilities was politically advantageous here in the UK.