Who is Simon Wessely?

NelliePledge said:
Like a mushroom he pops up everywhere

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48850490
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Oh, sure, ask the guy who should be famous for arguing that not once, not twice, not thrice, but about four distinct conditions that turned out to be entirely wrong. Somehow still credible, inexplicably.

It's actually correct here but for the wrong reasons because it has nothing to do with actual symptoms, it's fake behavior and the guy who built his career arguing the same about genuine diseases can't tell it apart. There are so many famous cases of that, from snake handlers, faith healers who make people fall down by swatting them with a jacket and the very same with bullshido, where "masters" basically throw people to the ground by simply screaming.

It's acting, you dumbass. There is no mass hysteria, people are simply playing along because they want to, not because they are unable to control themselves. Completely different thing and having nothing whatsoever to do with complex diseases Wessely denies exist.

Again, the "bird expert" arguing that bats are clearly just a type of bird. It makes question both expertises if he insists they are one and the same. What tripe.
 
Amw66 said:
Aluminium poisoning
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Yup, Camelford. This one the government apologized for, but the guy responsible for making up the lies is somehow blameless.

Also he wrote an article in 2001 saying "9/11 WTC health problems are mass hysteria, an 'illness' of fear", also ignored. I guess jury is still kind of out on GWI, as far as some people are concerned anyway because they have made-up their mind and will never change. But with the 9/11 first-responders bill in the news recently it's disappointing that Wessely's baseless claims aren't considered controversial when they perfectly mirror the same failure with ME and GWI.
 
5 February 2020

King's College London Regius Professor of Psychiatry appointed to ESRC Council
The Board of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has appointed Professor Sir Simon Wessely as a member to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Professor Sir Simon Wessely, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London, joins two other new members of the ESCRC’s Council which comprises representatives from the academic community as well as individuals from business and the public sector.

Members of the council work with Executive Chair Professor Jennifer Rubin to shape the ESRC’s strategy and to support UKRI's overall mission to maintain the UK’s world-leading position in research and innovation. ESRC Council members also provide Professor Rubin, and UKRI more widely, with input, intelligence and feedback from their communities and stakeholder groups
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From the start of my career as a medical academic, I have always been fascinated by how health is influenced by our bodies, our minds and the societies we live in. I have also found that some of the best collaborations I have had have been beyond the field of medicine – with social scientists, historians, anthropologists, lawyers, statisticians – you name it, I have worked with them. So joining the Council of ESRC, committed to using all the social sciences for the benefit of health and wellbeing, is something close to a dream.– Professor Sir Simon Wessely from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
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enjoy your dream SW; just remember the nightmare you created for a lot of people
 
Give us the opportunity to influence policy without our views being hijacked and distorted by academics.

https://madcovid.com/2020/05/04/giv...es-off-the-back-of-our-collective-experience/

About more than Wessely himself but those are the relevant passages:
Professor Sir Simon Wessely was the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists during the period 2014-2017. In the early part of his career, Wessely worked on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a debilitating condition in which people suffer from extreme fatigue, with unknown cause and uncertain prognosis. He became convinced there was a strong psychological component and worked on a treatment which combined graded physical exercise with a form of cognitive behavioural therapy that challenged patient’s beliefs about their condition. He was involved in a large-scale trial designed to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of his treatment. Reputable scientists have highlighted serious flaws in the design and implementation of the trial and the findings are disputed. Wessely questioned whether there is an organic cause for ME/CFD but he has been strongly criticised by scientists and ME/CFD sufferers alike. His critics have included Malcolm Hooper a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry who has researched organic causes of the condition, and the Countess of Mar who fell ill with ME/CFD after being exposed to an organo-phosphate sheep dip.
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Wessely’s pernicious influence goes considerably deeper than this however. Early in his career, he developed an unhealthy interest in malingering. In the early 1990s, ME/CFD attracted the attention of Chief Medical Officer Malcolm Aylward at the Department of Work and Pensions. Increasing numbers of sufferers were claiming Incapacity Benefit and, in the absence of a clear-cut physical test, Aylward was concerned that some claims could be fraudulent. Meanwhile, the ME Association was actively campaigning to have ME/CFD reclassified as a physiological disorder so that it would be covered by medical insurance.
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By now, Wessely was an acknowledged expert on ME/CFD and correspondence between Wessely and Aylward shows him actively campaigning to have ME/CFD classified as a psychiatric disorder with a strong psychological component, which would have the effect of nullifying many insurance claims. Asked to summarize the science, Wessely wrote that “it seems likely that the greater the disability, the more likely is the disorder to be associated with either misdiagnosed psychiatric disorder or poor illness management”. Given the limited knowledge that existed at that time about the causes of ME/CFD, it is distasteful to see a prominent psychiatrist campaigning for changes which would have a massively negative impact on the lives of many of his former patients based on a biased representation of the science.
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In November 2001, Wessely took part in the notorious Malingering and Illness Deception Conference held at Woodstock, near Oxford. Sponsored by an insurance industry eager to reduce claims for medical disability and attended by Malcolm Aylward, the conference helped to pave the way for the New Labour programme for reducing money spent on Incapacity Benefit. This programme served as a precursor to subsequent policies developed by the DWP under the Tory austerity policies which have decimated the social care budget and caused immense harm to many vulnerable and disabled people.
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Responding to a discussion on the Post covid thread.
https://www.s4me.info/threads/possibility-of-me-or-pvfs-after-covid-19.14074/page-31#post-270272

Sean said:
Reading Wessely's first half dozen publications on ME/CFS is very revealing. His view on it was fixed from day one, and he has not deviated since, other than an early concession that it was not just a form of depression.

Also shows his highly political style of debate was there from the start too.
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I remember Wessely talking about his education and his decision to do medicine. It seemed right from the start he wasn't interested in science, or in medicine, but more in a route into an easy to eminence and influence. He just loves being given awards and titles and being 'in' with powerful people and being treated as an expert (and being photographed with royals).

So very early in his career he found a niche where he could be king, and, conveniently for him, he could invent a theory that didn't require any medical or scientific understanding or knowledge.

Psychosomatic medicine is ideal for people like that - their patients rarely die, so it doesn't matter if they don't do anything useful for them, they won't be found out as useless.

It's a field serious doctors avoid, so there won't be any danger of their lazy research and useless treatments being discovered to be fraudulent.

And they can spend their medical consultations being 'wise' and 'helpful' to patients grateful to have someone to listen to them, and with symptoms that can be 'measured' only by questionnaire, so are amenable to persuasion to make it look like the 'treatment' is successful.

And the crap research and treatment is so easy to do, you don't need either medical training or intelligence to do it, so they can train up idiots like Chalder and Moss-Morris, and make sure they get professorships too, so they can front the research and name the silly questionnaires after themselves, and then be on the front line to take the flak when the shit hits the fan, while the great eminence himself has moved on to higher things, like advising governments.

Well that felt good writing that!
 
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