Who is Simon Wessely?

Heaven forbid interruption of his career when he’s shat on our lives. Then he rewrites his gulf war story. Do any ME groups have connections with GWS groups because it still seems an unrecognized area in UK and I can’t imagine former soldiers being thrilled with insinuations of group think anxiety needing CBT like us (what I’ve heard as wesselys contribution, happy to be corrected) ? Giving them a pension doesnt equal having your illness researched and treatment found and back to fit life.
Never miss a chance to smear us and paint yourself as a hero simon. Just a little bit of light exercise and back to work.

Should we offer him a chance of debate with those he doesn’t agree with now -him versus Ron Davis, him versus David Tuller or a ticket to an Iime conference where he can present on why ME is a grey area of medicine best tackled with rehabilitation.
 
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I guess I'll do our standard writeup this time!


On the part relevant to us:

The way this is worded it seems as if he was indeed studying ME, which is also called CFS, and his research found that a third of those patients with make a full recovery riding the cbtgettrain.

This confuses me because every time this is brought up with his group they seem to claim they were never ever studying ME, but CFS as defined by whatever they please on any given day, while 'recovery' can mean anything you want the word to mean from 'deteriorated a lot' to 'had a mild statistically insignificant fluctuation in symptoms'. But 'full recovery' when studying 'ME' is a weird claim because the evidence, as far as I can see, does indeed speak for itself. So he is either lying, misrepresented by the interviewer or referring to unpublished research he has lying around in his office somewhere which would be a bit unethical I'd think.

Given that this recovery claim is to the best of our knowledge a complete fabrication and somewhat central to his entire career - how high quality can his reports to advise the government on any issues really be?


On the point that needs to be hammered home with everyone outside our own bubble:
The way the whole interview is set up is interesting in the same way those things usually are. Be it Esther with her daddy issues, Trudie with her horrible heckling incidents that she claimed were extremely threatening (or am I misremembering this part? It is hard to keep up with what their weird version of reality is at any given point in time), Simon with his Holocaust thingy here or all the death threats that they made out of newspapers themselves to paint a picture of what a death threat might have looked like, it is always the same technique where they try to make themselves come across as pitiable victims.
This is a move that is used by psychopaths all over the world because they at some point in they lives must have noticed it makes people easier to manipulate. It is pretty devious because it is not necessarily completely disingenous - e.g. if Esther really had a weird relationship with her father (or whatever it was she was claiming exactly) it would really suck for her.
But that does not mean that researching sick kids standing on a bit of paper shouting STOP at it and finding that it does, in fact, not do anything and then going on to report it as the next big treatment almost ready to roll out is not malpractice.
 
At first I thought this was an article in the national newspaper the Daily Star, but it appears to a local paper be the Sheffield Star.

Funny that, just last week the Times of London does an article on how the Lancet should review the flawed PACE trial and the best access the SMC get for their usual unscientific PR nonsense is to the Sheffield Star.

Oh how times have changed.
 
large donner said:
Funny that, just last week the Times of London does an article on how the Lancet should review the flawed PACE trial and the best access the SMC get for their usual unscientific PR nonsense is to the Sheffield Star.
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I doubt it has any connection with the latest PACE publicity. It's more likely to be related to his role writing mental health policy for the government. And just a bit of self publicity for Simon in the local paper of the area her grew up in. The ME part of the story is just part of his self-mythologising about what a brave and wonderful man he is for helping lots of people to recover from ME against so much (alleged) hostility.
 
Trish said:
I doubt it has any connection with the latest PACE publicity. It's more likely to be related to his role writing mental health policy for the government. And just a bit of self publicity for Simon in the local paper of the area her grew up in. The ME part of the story is just part of his self-mythologising about what a brave and wonderful man he is for helping lots of people to recover from ME against so much (alleged) hostility.
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But ME is being swallowed up into MUS and will be part of the mental health agenda- again! So the picture is being reinforced in mainstream...
 
Simon Wessely said:
I was much stronger on arts subjects than science
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Ain’t that the truth! Very good at making stuff up. Not so good at scientific rigour.

Simon Wessely said:
It's not been pleasant. It's a difficult area for me to talk about. I would describe it as stalking, unpleasant ways of people trying to interrupt your career, incite hostility, threats.
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So difficult to talk about that any time he is interviewed you can pretty much guarantee that he will talk about it.

Simon Wessely said:
By contrast his work on military health has been the 'most satisfying and enjoyable' part of his career ... we never really found out what it was. We found out all the things it wasn't.
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Please do not misunderstand what he is saying here. He is definitely not suggesting that he didn’t enjoying working in ME/CFS research because people with ME are so horrible. Definitely, definitely not.

How satisfying it must be for a scientist to discover precisely nothing about the subject they are researching. It’s a wonder he didn’t receive a Nobel prize for discovering what GWI isn’t. I’m sure all the GWI veterans think he’s wonderful.

Simon Wessely said:
The kind of views that would go around in the doctors' mess - looking back, I'm sometimes quite ashamed of some of the stuff that went on, some of the banter and the way we described certain groups of patients. This was standard across medicine.
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No surprise to learn that Sir Simon used to mock certain groups of patients, but it is surprising to hear him admit it. I do not believe that all doctors used to talk about their patients in the way that Simon Wessely spoke about people with ME. However, his confession would appear to add weight to allegations that have been made about his conduct when giving talks about ME to medical professionals.

Despite admitting to feeling ashamed, it is notable that he does not apologise. Because, of course, everyone else was doing it, which makes it perfectly OK, doesn’t it?
 
Robert 1973 said:
Ain’t that the truth! Very good at making stuff up. Not so good at scientific rigour.
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That’s probably why he did psychiatry. Did you see this bit

Psychiatry attracts 'a certain type', he says. "They tend to be a bit older - I always tell people psychiatry is medicine for grown-ups. I did the running around, 'Quick nurse, give me the needle', and all that stuff, up in Newcastle. It was interesting, but I didn't want to spend my life doing that."

Read more at: https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/heal...hood-and-life-as-a-top-psychiatrist-1-9331473
He always manages to put his colleagues down, that’s why I think he has an ego problem
 
His research, carried out with colleagues, found combining cognitive behavioural therapy with light exercise brought about a full recovery in a third of patients.
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He made the same claim nearly a decade back in a puff piece on him in New Scientist.

"How successful is your treatment of CFS?
Roughly a third of people completely recover and a third show good improvement. About a third we can’t do much for."
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It was disgraceful fraud then, and is even more so now post-PACE.

:grumpy:
 

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Robert 1973 said:
It’s a wonder he didn’t receive a Nobel prize for discovering what GWI isn’t.
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well he did get a knighthood for his 'services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine', and will probably be made a peer for his current 'services to mental health'.

Cinders66 said:
'Quick nurse, give me the needle'
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laughed at this......

"to give someone "the needle", insulting and teasing someone which results in the person becoming irate and/or defensive, thus the person would have "the needle""

Michael Sharpe springs to mind more though...with Wessely it seems it's more like water off a ducks back:emoji_duck:
 
In this profile from the Times Wessely put on his website you also have the same myth:

"He discovered that by combining cognitive behavioural therapy and light exercise a third of patients make a full recovery."

https://web.archive.org/web/2018090...-professor-simon-wessely-times-6-august-2011/

Strange how journalists profiling Wessely keep promoting this falsehood. Where do they get this misleading claim from?
 
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That’s a third of ambulant patients who’d consent to a Kings referreal? I assume he never ventured out if the clinic. And the rest is explained by Oxford criteria I guess.
He simply doesn’t seem to care about the rest, including the third they can’t do much for.
 
Cinders66 said:
That’s a third of ambulant patients who’d consent to a Kings referreal? I assume he never ventured out if the clinic. And the rest is explained by Oxford criteria I guess.
He simply doesn’t seem to care about the rest, including the third they can’t do much for.
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Is there data to support even that? I've no idea where the claim comes from. Seems to have been pretty thoroughly debunked by data from the PACE trial though: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21641846.2017.1259724?journalCode=rftg20
 
Esther12 said:
In this profile in the Times Wessely put on his website you also have the same myth:

"He discovered that by combining cognitive behavioural therapy and light exercise a third of patients make a full recovery."

https://web.archive.org/web/2018090...-professor-simon-wessely-times-6-august-2011/

Strange how journalists profiling Wessely keep promoting this falsehood. Where do they get this misleading claim from?
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He probably wrote it in his bio and they regurgitate it.
 
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