Who is Simon Wessely?

Sly Saint said:
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No, unfortunately holidays are a secondary benefit of being able to work and the chronically ill can't just book a holiday where they can get a break from being ill.

Being able to pay for holidays is also a secondary benefit of work that once again the chronically ill who are unable to work cannot afford - whether in Malta or the UK.

P.S. I hope the people wearing masks in Malta don't make you panic too much and ruin your holiday.
 
Who knows who Simon Wessely is, but perhaps we should look at those who guided and influenced him in his formative years. This appeared at the bottom of his 1987 Hysteria paper.

I wish to thank Professor M. Shepherd, Professor
G. F. M. Russell and Dr R. Dolan for their help and
advice

They seem to be the ones who set him on his way.
 
Good suggestion, chrisb.

Russell specialised in eating disorders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Russell

Shepherd was noted for Olympian detachment towards patients
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shepherd_(psychiatrist)

Dolan researches how emotion impacts on cognition and its aberrant expression in disease
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mental-health/people/professor-ray-dolan

That 1987 paper set the tone for Wessely's remarkably illustrious career, didn't it?

"Steps must be taken to remove the advantages of the sick-role by the withdrawal of social validation."​

What purports to be a treatment for "mass motor hysteria" became a prescription for pwME.

Apologies if this has been discussed ad nauseam, the thread is a bit long to read from the beginning.
 
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I can't find it.

Do people like SW know they're wrong and do what they do anyway or do they believe in their own delusion against all evidence?

In general, not referring to anyone specific:

Knowing/being aware/having a sense of reality or not makes the difference between 1st, 2nd etc. murder & guilty/not guilty of people dying by somebody's actions. Again, in general.
 
NelliePledge said:
Whatever your original motivation when you spout rubbish for so long you end up believing it.
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don't know if this has been posted
Simon Wessely
CFS Personal Story
CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT

We looked at how infection is related to CFS – an obvious thing to do since so many patients told us that their condition had started with a virus, and one of the other labels for the illness at the time was postviral fatigue syndrome. We did a big study in primary care, in which we followed up over a thousand people who presented to their GP with an infection, and then the next person in the surgery who didn’t. This study failed to show that common viruses such as influenza were triggering CFS. But at the same time, looking at more severe infections, we showed that viral meningitis definitely did. Meanwhile our colleague Peter White at Barts produced the definitive study that linked the Epstein Barr virus, the virus that causes glandular fever, to CFS. We went on to replicate that, and look at what predicted early symptoms versus late symptoms after confirmed EBV.
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  1. Whilst at Queen Square I had met up with Trudie Chalder, then working as a behavioural nurse therapist on the same ward. It was the start of a 20 year collaboration that is still going strong. We talked a lot about CFS, and why everyone seemed to think that nothing could be done. So in 1989 we wrote a paper advancing a theory, which was that cognitive and behavioural factors might help explain not why patients got ill in the first place, but why they weren’t getting better. And from that we developed a specific intervention for CFS, adapting something known as cognitive behaviour therapy, which was already achieving considerable success in the pain world. So we first of all simply tried treating 50 patients at Queen Square, with good results (1991), and perhaps most interestingly, with improvements that could still be detected some years later.
  2. Then in 1991 I got a consultant/senior lecturer post at King’s College Hospital. I set up what was one of the first NHS only services exclusively devoted to CFS patients – still going strong today, with Trudie, now Professor Chalder, in charge. We got a grant to do what was needed, which was an randomised controlled trial (RCT) of CBT, comparing it with the same number of sessions of relaxation therapy. CBT performed well. At the same time Mike Sharpe at Oxford, now Professor Sharpe, had independently developed a cognitively behavioural approach to treatment and carried out a trial that had similarly positive results. We both published our results in 1997.
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http://www.simonwessely.com/index.php/cfs-personal-story/
 
SW said:
Whilst at Queen Square I had met up with Trudie Chalder, then working as a behavioural nurse therapist on the same ward. It was the start of a 20 year collaboration that is still going strong.
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By the way, some authors refer to the Chalder Fatigue Scale as the Wessely Fatigue Scale, who was the initial developer. Maybe they preferred Chalder Fatigue Scale as it provides a confusing acronym (CFS).
 
Sly Saint said:
don't know if this has been posted
Simon Wessely
CFS Personal Story
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I recommend reading this page on the website. This is how he sees himself. How he and colleagues made a big impact for the disease. Found biological causes (specific viruses) and biological testable abnormalities. He championed the Gulf War Syndrome patients and started research programs. He got out of CFS a long time ago when he started on GWS - around the mid-1990's he states. He's distancing himself.

He doesn't mention false illness beliefs. Or that he was a champion for the DWP to find a way to deny the disease. Or how he helped manipulate the press via the Science Media Center.

This sums it up.
Sometimes when one looks back, one gets a sense of “why on earth did I do that?”. But not in this case. Yes, one would do some things a little differently. And yes, my writing style has improved over twenty years. But overall, I think that we (and like all medical research, it most definitely was a “we”) achieved quite a lot for the benefit of medicine and patients.
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