Who is Simon Wessely?

Sly Saint said:
The gentle art of winning friends and influencing people

http://www.simonwessely.com/Downloads/Blogs/32 The gentle art of winning friends and influencing people.docx
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Now that really would make you sick. :yuck:

Gentle art my ar.. It might be gentle if you're on the schmoozing end but when you're on other side of it it's more akin to violence.

Same error of logic the gives rise to the idea of a victimless crime.

Funny, how many errors in logic these people make. Less amusing is how the errors always work in their favour.

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PACE Trial (CBT & GET) appears, Wessely gives support.

Patients complain some are injured by CBT & GET.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

ME Physicians refute CBT & GET claims.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

ME groups come out and condemn CBT & GET.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

2-day CPET results.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

National Institutes of Health, “Oxford definition needs to be retired”.
Wessely sticks with Oxford's definition.

PACE's CBT & GET reanalyzed.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

CDC removes CBT & GET from CFS treatment.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

Parliament comes out against PACE's CBT & GET.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

The nanoneedle comes out, possible bio-marker.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

2-day CPET confirmed PEM, possible bio-marker.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

Bhupesh Prusty publishes Mitochondrial Fragmentation.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

Ian Lipkin's B-cell protein assay comes out possible bio-marker.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

ME patients recommend pacing to long-COVID patients.
Wessely explains pacing is GET. Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

Surprise, Sir Wessely and Chalder come out with PACE II or CBT with hidden GET.
Wessely sticks with CBT & GET.

Who is Sir Simon Wessely? Maybe the greatest cognitively rigid thinker of our time. Sir Wessely has worked hard to prove he can not and he will not be moved when it comes to CBT & GET. Decades of hard rigid thinking. In a way it is impressive, not in a good way but still impressive.
 
And the latest twist. Prof Paul Garner who has long Covid talks on Twitter about needing to pace and not exceed his energy envelope and not triggering PEM. Wessely replies pretending to agree with Garner, saying GET includes not pushing into bad PEM.
Wessely sticks with CBT and GET.
 
In SW's reply t Dan W's tweet he did not refute that the boy was taken on a ghost train ride to frighten him. Honestly, it does sound apochryphal to me, the very idea people would do this but he didn't refute it just that an inquiry refuted the swimming pool thing.
 
Is this a debate over the meaning of "thrown", and possible idiomatic usage?

Whilst I'm on this thread I did notice something interesting in http://www.margaretwilliams.me/2017/quotable-quotes-continued.pdf @p26

2012

A modern perspective on some of the most highly cited JNNP papers of all time Simon Wessely JNNP 2012:83:4-5 (Simon Wessely revisits his own 1989 paper “The nature of fatigue: a comparison of chronic ‘Postviral’ fatigue with neuromuscular and affective disorders”)

“In 1987 I was a senior registrar on the Maudsley psychiatry training scheme when I was moved at short notice up to the National Hospital for Neurology, London….I soon expressed an interest in seeing one group of patients who … were not popular with the neurologists who ran the place”.

Yet the 1988 paper by David, Wessely and Pelosi- PVFS Time for a new approach -indicates that it was accepted by the BMJ in September 1987. Work back from that to when the first draft must have been started, and further back to the formation of the concept... one sees how SW has risen so far, so fast. To gain such expertise, on so complex a subject, in so short a period of time requires huge skill...or chutzpah.
 
I remember reading that the child's mother was present when the child was in the swimming pool. I suspect this is one of those BPS things where it revolves round wording not concept.

Someone says "thrown" in the pool when he was actually lowered in carefully so it is correct it is not true. That it was done so that he would be forced to move as a reflex not to drown is ignored.

Edit to add. It is almost unbelievable that he should be taken on a ghost train and that works against us all the time.

People just cannot believe how we have been treated.

The thinking behind all this was that the child did not move because he was choosing not to so they put him in situations where instinct would override his conscious mind. It did not happen because they were wrong.
 
But, for the avoidance of doubt, it seems unlikely that SW was anywhere near the scene at the time, nor that he had given instructions for this to happen. However, had it not been for his intervention this event might not have occurred.

Going back to 1987 there seem to be important issues for the understanding of the foundations of the BPS method under SW and co. What, or who, were the patients he was seeing? Had they all been passed to him as the end of the diagnostic chain after rejection by all other specialties, and following testing in other departments? I was forced to wonder about this when recalling that my diagnosis took something like a year and a half of various tests to exclude anything else. Had SW's patients already been extensively tested within the hospital system, or was he starting fresh on them? If so what tests could have been or were done in the period of six months or so before it was determined that a new approach was called for.

We have no information, other than that more or less accidentally given away by Reviewer 2, otherwise known as Anthony Pelosi, as what went on at this formative period. We also do not know whether the patients were registered in to some consultant under whom SW and AD were working, and if so what supervision was exercised. Is it normal for a senior Registrar, as SW apparently was, to have this degree of control unsupervised?There must be another name that we need to know.
 
rvallee said:
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Thanks for the post. If I can use precise quotes, on his website SW says:

"Allegation: “Wessely threw a boy into a swimming pool to see whether he would sink or swim”" and then ends with "Needless to say, I have never thrown this child, or any other, into a swimming pool."

Firstly, where has the sentence "Wessely threw a boy into a swimming pool to see whether he would sink or swim" come from, other than his own website? Is this an actual quote that he is citing?

Secondly, "I have never thrown this child, or any other, into a swimming pool.". So if SW didn't, did anyone else?

The relevant line in the Femail article says: "Treatment included being thrown into a cold swimming pool". It at no point states who was responsible for this if this allegation is indeed true.

If EP was put into a swimming pool - and I say "If" - was he lowered into a pool rather than "thrown" in?

Was EP, Channel 4, the production company of the Channel 4 show sued or threatened with legal action at any point after these allegations were made? Was the Daily Mail? Did the Daily Mail have to print a correction?

I don't think my questions are pedantic or vexatious, by the way.
 
The council report on the enquiry which followed the claims is available somewhere on the internet. My recollection is that a therapist was responsible for placing Ean in the pool to, misguidedly, try to induce movement. The attempt was a failure.
 
chrisb said:
The council report on the enquiry which followed the claims is available somewhere on the internet. My recollection is that a therapist was responsible for placing Ean in the pool to, misguidedly, try to induce movement. The attempt was a failure.
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Thanks for the clarification.
 
chrisb said:
The council report on the enquiry which followed the claims is available somewhere on the internet. My recollection is that a therapist was responsible for placing Ean in the pool to, misguidedly, try to induce movement. The attempt was a failure.
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The thing about denying the general idea of what happened is that it's consistent with how often the argument is made that if there was a fire most of us would be running our ass off and that proves we can do it any time. Which is a similar argument to the fact that most people in wheelchairs could crawl up stairs on their butt if they have to. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to deny them wheelchairs. The idea of disability being only possible in permanence and totality is incredibly ingrained in medicine, even though it's very far from reality.

Obviously he would not have been "thrown" but this is little different from placing food out of reach for severe patients held in psychiatric confinement, the idea is the same. This is all very consistent with how we are treated, making the story not only believable but pretty much unsurprising. It was pretty much inevitable that someone would try it and I highly doubt it's the only instance.
 
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