Who is Simon Wessely?

Who is Wessely? A chameleon.... who changes his rhetoric to suit the occasion or the audience. A real establishment behind the scenes man. With equally ambitious wife, has resulted in disservice to an enormous number of patients; whether that be ME or Gulf War Veterans or those poisoned at Camelford. He tried to influence the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in 2004 via the Advisory Committee on Pesticides chaired by his crony David Coggon..... influenced both RCPCH paediatric report on ME and screened the York Review for same. This in turn was used amended for NICE in 2007... Also pulling strings within the MRC over ME research bids .... according to Stephen Holgate.... He is a flippant delivery in his lectures and the most ginormous ego......

 

I find the few numbers of people who initially invested in this and got it rolling encouraging. But the snowball effect have been devastating. Don’t know how the situation actually is by May 2019? Progress is made, but the pseudoscience seems so incredibly deeply rooted.

It is just bizarre how a little group of psychiatrists without documenting their claims can control a field for such a long time. That says a lot of what may happen if medicine in large loose interest, like for the last 40 years and how a non-scientific approach, not really asking the though questions, not really demanding evidence. That paves the way for pseudoscience as acceptable, finding its way to important documents, into the organizations and so on. Wessley and co have had an open door and they have played it brilliant. If it just was a game.. Not saying that this have been easy in any way for the environment outside (the general and medical) to get a grip of and necessarily do so much about, but the timeline here. Decades..!?

 

I don't think he is the father of the "all in the mind" view. He's certainly an important Perpetuator though, which amazingly he has done by proclaiming on many, many occasions that he doesn't believe it's "all in the mind". Many medics (neurologists, virologists, epidemiologists) viewed it as psychogenic long before the 1990s. Medicine hates uncertainty and things that can't be treated, so having a box to put things in when you don't know the answer means that some kind of psychogenic categorisation was inevitable. It's the easy default - and only those who want to be credited with lazy thinking should take any credit for it.

 

His first paper was called "New Wine in Old Bottles" and he said that ME was the modern name for neurasthenia. His university website said that neurasthenia had faded since Victorian times but reemerged in the 80's. The epidemics were completely ignored.

The neurasthenia link brought in the chronic fatigue link. Before that, ME was seen as a disease where exertion made symptoms worse. In effect exercise was to ME what pollen is to hay fever. Most of our problems have been caused or exacerbated by making it about fatigue, a common problem with no specificity.

He was also chief medical officer or something like that with responsibility for psychology with NATO. I read that he was called in to look at the psychological effects after 9/11 but heard no more about that.

I believe he was also involved in the defining of CFS in some way.

The investigations into physical problems were done in a cynical manner designed to dismiss them rather than looking for answers which would help patients. Those of us who lived through those days know exactly what he is and has done for us.

 

It is necessary to add a caveat to the above. His first paper was on Mass Hysteria and a proposed recategorization. That included a reference to the Royal Free outbreak.

 

His first paper was actually this one: Postviral fatigue syndrome: time for a new approach.

But this was after Holmes et al. had coined and defined "chronic fatigue syndrome". They were merely transfering and cementing the damage that had already been done in the US, which SW actually acknowledges in his "New Wine in Old Bottles" rehash.

 

Sorry, but the paper on mass hysteria was published a year before that. I will try to find it. It may take some time.

 

I found that one too (it's here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3575566), but the PVFS paper is the one he actually labels No. 1 in his own archive!

 

Clearly it must be put in the WOO category. Those who know their Beethoven will know that stands for Werke ohne Opus. I cannot imagine what you thought it was.

 

Yes, that's true, Wessely did not invent the idea of psychogenic illness, but I read an article years ago which explained the history, and that Simon Wessely single handedly resurrected the notion of psychogenic illness from its then moribund state.

I can't find the article now (it may have been one of Margaret Williams or Prof Malcolm Hoopers's articles), but it explained that the concept of psychogenic illness had died a natural death, I expect essentially because idea was untenable, due to lack of evidence.

However, Wessely in his early career revived it, and gave it fresh life, and this is the reason that not only ME/CFS was recast as psychogenic, but also other diseases such as interstitial cystitis, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, etc.

Not to mention his application of psychogenic ideas to the Camelford water poisoning incident in 1988, and to Gulf War Illness, which is epidemiologically linked to organophosphate poisoning. His ideas were always very handy if ever you wanted to make a disease or poisoning incident disappear.

In this way, Wessely seemed to (perhaps inadvertently) become the medical equivalent of a mafia hitman: if you needed a disease or incident "disappeared" then you just needed to hire Wessely.

The disability insurance industry certainly found the services and ideas of Wessely and colleagues very useful in the 1980s, when there was a 5-fold or more increase in the incidence of ME/CFS (by these insurance companys' own claim statistics), and insurance companies such as UNUM could have become bankrupt had it not been for the "disease disappearance services" of Wessely and colleagues.

A Prof Malcolm Hooper article talks about this: Magical Medicine: How to Make a Disease Disappear.

 

He's a very naughty boy, that's who he is.

 

Indeed! And to give the full Monty Python quote:

 

I like the fact that he was the one who was asked about his opinion almost immediately after the nanoneedle, I mean is that a coincidence?

 

Actually, his first paper was a weird report on Dementia. At least, that's what he says on his website:

 

So many papers. Has anyone ever studied whether their is an inverse relationship between number of papers written and understanding of the nature of the problems.

EDIT. I did mean his first paper referring to ME. I bet he wishes he hadn't mentioned the Royal Free epidemic in a paper on hysteria.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1126117058922545153


Simon Wessely will be interviewing Ken Loach (who made the film 'I Daniel Blake'); I wonder if Ken Loach is aware of SWs role in the adoption, or should that be adaption, of BPS 'theory' that has lead to the atrocious treatment of sick and disabled people in the UK?