Who is Simon Wessely?

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-03-25-honorary-degree-recipients-2019-announced

I’m sure we all feel this is so well deserved.

“
Professor Sir Simon Wessely is Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and a Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at King’s College and the Maudsley Hospitals. In a career spanning general hospital psychiatry as well as academia, Sir Simon has particular interests in unexplained symptoms and syndromes, population reactions to adversity, and military health. He founded the King’s Centre for Military Health Research; has published books on chronic fatigue syndrome, randomised controlled trials, and a history of military psychiatry; and regularly contributes to discussions on science and medicine on radio and television.
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Wessely himself has no conceit whatsoever:
@WesselyS: I came to Oxford as a student 40 yrs ago.That summer Herbert Von Karajan received an honorary degree and brought with him the Berlin Phil to play Straus in the Sheldonian. I was there. It feels unreal to receive the same honour, albeit without an orchestra, today. Thank you.
 
There is hardly a more reliable feature of a broken system than rewarding failure and mediocrity. And when a system of medicine rewards one of his own, again, after all the harm he has done to millions, it reveals how thoroughly it has lost its way.

"Do no harm" is now "or do, whatever, we don't actually care, it's booming time!".
 
Cinders66 said:
Wessely himself has no conceit whatsoever:
@WesselyS: I came to Oxford as a student 40 yrs ago.That summer Herbert Von Karajan received an honorary degree and brought with him the Berlin Phil to play Straus in the Sheldonian. I was there. It feels unreal to receive the same honour, albeit without an orchestra, today.
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Perfect illustration of SW's sleight of mind, with his faux self deprecating modesty that so unconsciously sets him on a similar pedestal to someone he wants people to see him as being equally illustrious. Everything he does is so calculating, especially when it appears not to be so.
 
Amw66 said:
I can't t help feeling it will be GWI and not CFS that will be his undoing.

GWI at least gets US research funding and Sir Simon' s stance on this is well documented

When the arguments start rolling back on it the end game may be playing out.
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That and the 9/11 WTC health problems. Holy crap does it look bad with hindsight. Says a lot that it still makes no difference to his credibility. But then again the UK government formally apologized for Camelford and he suffered no loss of credibility either. Almost as if his reputation was maybe a bit on the undeserved side and not related at all to what he does, rather what he claims to do.

It's always a bad idea to bet on extraordinary claims with no ordinary evidence. Sometimes it works for a while, until it doesn't.
 
Sly Saint said:
Ethics fly out of the window at Oxford University when big donors come calling



article in guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...xford-university-when-big-donors-come-calling
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The Schwarzman Centre – with the humanities, the study of ethics in particular?
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Uuhhhh. Right. That makes as much sense as the Kochs center for the study of renewable energy or the Derek Zoolander for children who can't read good and wanna do other stuff good to.

Echoes of Sharpe arguing about morals: to any debate, even about morals and ethics, someone will argue against them.
 
Can anyone help me track down an old Wessely interview...

On 5 March 2010, BMJ uploaded an audio recording of an interview with Simon Wessely. BMJ's website long-ago deactivated the link to this interview.

The interview contained this quote from SW:
"We’re not going to go doing more and more tests to find out what was the virus because, frankly, even if we found it there's nothing we're going to do about it. We're in the business of rehabilitation."

Does anyone have access to either a transcript or recording of this interview?
 
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