Who is Simon Wessely?

If anyone wants to hear what he says, BBC iplayer, about 20 minutes into the program for about 3 minutes. Something and nothing. The impression left with me was that it wasn't so much the death threats that stopped him working on CFS, but the unpleasant atmosphere around research and the stalking (?) and reporting researchers like him to authorities, or something. He said it wasn't patients, it was 'groups'. He said he still treats patients, and they are fine.

I think he said something like he couldn't understand why people like him were the target, since they were the ones who believed CFS is real. And he claimed to have developed treatments that help, though there is no cure.

The impression he clearly wanted to give was that he is one of the good guys, and came up against groups (unspecified) who were against his work for no good reason.
 
Perfectly understandable, for someone who doesn't like or understand people, not even notional people.

So not people per say, more the idea of people, seems to be what concerns him.

In much the same way I am unusually happy to be around a beef burger, but even the idea of being in the middle of a stampeding herd of several billion cattle would concern me.

He may be in the wrong job.

After all, who would choose to have any involvement at all with loads of pre-burgers that have their own opinions, and can answer back and object to the very processes that couldn, if done by a professional, lead to them having success, as burgers.
 
Trish said:
If anyone wants to hear what he says, BBC iplayer, about 20 minutes into the program for about 3 minutes.
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I've done a transcript:

(from 20 mins in):

Lauren: So Simon, in the late 80s, you worked as a trainee psychiatrist in the National Hospital for Neurology in London, and that marked the beginning of your research into chronic fatigue syndrome. What interested you in the condition to begin with?

SW: It doesn’t have a natural home. So, Lauren, if you, on your way home, start to have a heart attack, you will see a cardiologist. And if I, if this interview is so terrible that I give you post-traumatic stress disorder, you would see a psychiatrist. That’s how it works. But if, in *this* condition, it’s not clear who you should see. Nobody claims it and therefore there’s no obvious safe place for patients to be, and the backstory comes from these newspaper headlines that were, even then, saying things like, “Virus research doctors finally prove shirkers really are sick”. So the view was that you were going to be considered a shirker, a malingerer, making it all up. And I suppose I thought, p’rhaps naively at that time, that we could do some good here, because I thought, well, we can’t treat people worse – they weren’t getting any treatment at all. But it became, as I mentioned, the controversies that were there never went away, and it became an unpleasant area to be specialising in – not clinically: the patients were fine and to this day I still see them – I must have seen, I don’t know, well over a thousand by now, and I wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t rewarding. But the public side of it became very toxic.

Lauren: Yes, I mean, you never discovered a cure, but certainly pioneered some treatments, with some success. [SW: Yes] But you received hate mail, even death threats.

SW: Well. It… That’s true. But that wasn’t really the problem. These things happen to lots of people. It was more the constant scrutiny, the pressure, the stalking, the referrals to regulatory bodies – it was that kind of thing that was the most difficult to bare, and I just…

Lauren: Where was that coming from?

SW: It was coming from some groups of people, not, as I say, not from my patients at all, but from the groups who didn’t want you there because of what you represented. And, certainly, you can understand why people get very cross and very frustrated and feel denigrated by that kind of dichotomy: if my problem was remotely psychological or social or psychiatric, it would mean I’m not ill, it would mean I’m actually making it up. And I think it does come down to that fear. And it’s a reasonable fear that people had, but it wasn’t reasonable, I think, to project it onto myself and my colleagues, who were not part of that and who, ironically, *we* were the people in hospital who *did* believe that this was a genuine illness.

Lauren: It must have been an incredibly stressful time for you going through all that, and your colleagues. You said there was a moment that you remember clearly, that it was time to stop. [SW: Yes] What happened?

SW: It was in 2000 that I was at a meeting in America – at NIH – National Institutes for Health – which is epicentre for medical research around the world – certainly the biggest – and it was, you know, unpleasant – the atmosphere was very hostile, and I remember taking the decision there that I just thought, I don’t want to do this any more, I don’t want to have to defend what I do, and so I took that decision, went back to the airport afterwards and for the first time in my life I got upgraded. I thought that must be a sign from heaven that this was meant to be.

Lauren: So Simon Wessely, by the mid 1990s, you’d turned your professional attention to Gulf War Syndrome…
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well, we can’t treat people worse – they weren’t getting any treatment at all.
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Something else you got wrong then.

What about the phrase (& I am paraphrasing here) "the only thing wrong with these people is their belief they have an illness called ME"?. Forgotten that have we?

Subtle repositioning - it wasn't his patients who had a problem. No, it was the public. Because we believed these patients were ill and nobody else did.

*snorts derisively*
 
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