Who is Simon Wessely?

Simon Wessely said:
because I thought, well, we can’t treat people worse – they weren’t getting any treatment at all
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And yet, he actually managed to make everything worse. You'd think it would be impossible to do worse than nothing. And yet here we are, still doing the very thing that made everything worse because these narcissists can't possibly imagine they are wrong about anything.

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…
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Accountability is a bummer when you are a quack making stuff up.
 
"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"

I wonder what this meeting was about? Says a lot though when the 'epicentre for medical research' give the eminent Simon Wessely a hostile reception.
 
rvallee said:
And yet, he actually managed to make everything worse. You'd think it would be impossible to do worse than nothing. And yet here we are, still doing the very thing that made everything worse because these narcissists can't possibly imagine they are wrong about anything.


Accountability is a bummer when you are a quack making stuff up.
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Yip I agree @rvallee "the referrals to regulatory bodies" - that's what they exist for i.e. to refer professionals you are concerned about.
 
Esther12 said:
Thanks Lucibee.... I hope it's not painful for me to now mention that there's an auto-transcript available here: Transcript of Professor Sir Simon Wessely from Desert Island Discs podcast | Happy Scribe Public

It will definitely be inferior!
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Just thought I'd quote a couple of bits from Wessely on why he went into psychiatry:

[00:16:29]
I found it really exciting that here was a discipline that was not afraid to challenge itself. It was all about the arguments. And there are always arguments in psychiatry. We love an argument and also that they were really accessible to other people.
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[00:16:50]
And then I liked the consultants, one, because they knew the names of all their patients, which wasn't common always. And second was because they would ask me a question. And bizarrely, they were actually interested in my answer, whereas in the rest of the medicine they would ask you, what are the nine causes of jaundice to show that you're an ignorant medical student because you only remembered eight.
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This attitude is just amazing. I can't believe someone thinks like this and was allowed to have power over others:

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.
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The whole section Lucibee transcribed is pretty amazing.
 
Wow. That all can be uncharitably interpreted as the thoughts of someone who struggled with the basic facts of medicine and so has a nicer time in an environment where facts aren't the driving force of treatment choice and there's a very low bar when assessing treatment effectiveness.
 
The idea of a stressful time after 2000 is a bit of a stretch too. I remember in the 90s being shocked when I read an article he wrote which began "I go to dinner parties and people ask me what I do. When I say I research CFS they say "Poor you." "

He was looking for pity right from the start. When he became involved there were doctors interested in ME and a lot was known about how it presented. When he pulled it towards psychology he condemned all of us.
 
...whereas in the rest of the medicine they would ask you, "what are the nine causes of jaundice" to show that you're an ignorant medical student because you only remembered eight.
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Actually, I'm with him on that. There is a tendency in medicine to put the ability to memorise facts (or factoids) above actually being able to think and work things out - which is I always found very off-putting. I wanted to go into psychology instead, but was told I couldn't because the medics had first dibs on the (limited number of) places. :(
(I later discovered that was a lie - my supervisor just didn't like me!)
 
Sly Saint said:
"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"

I wonder what this meeting was about? Says a lot though when the 'epicentre for medical research' give the eminent Simon Wessely a hostile reception.
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Possibly this one? NIH "State of the Science" conference - https://www.cfids-me.org/marys/nihprobs.html
 
Lucibee said:
Possibly this one? NIH "State of the Science" conference - https://www.cfids-me.org/marys/nihprobs.html
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nice find!
Hah, sidekick Sharpe was there as well:
"
If anyone had doubts as to the insularity of the NIH community, they were dispelled when the NIH secretly put together a "State of the Science" conference that was to help inform NIH decision-makers about the current status of research on CFS. In planning the conference, they invited only four "experts: Stephen Straus (of NIH), Mark Demitrack (of Eli Lilly), Simon Wesseley (from the UK), and Michael Sharpe (also from the UK). All are strongly biased in favor of the beliefs that CFS/M.E. is caused by "stress" and is a form of psychiatric illness they call "functional somatization;" Straus and Demitrack recommend SSRI's (Prozac) and "stress reduction," Wessely recommends traditional psychiatric talking therapy, and Sharpe recommends "cognitive behavior therapy;" all four recommend exercise. These are the only therapies any of the four acknowledges as valid.

After protest by the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Coordinating Committee (CFSCC), an advisory group chartered by Congress in 1997 to coordinate activities within the different agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) - including NIH - the name was changed to an "Internal NIAID Consultation." Dr. Nancy Klimas was added to the list of invited participants eight days before the conference was to be held, but she was not permitted to give a presentation (although unlike other observers from the CFSCC, she was permitted to speak up). It goes without saying that she was not a participant in the planning of the meeting.

Our concern did not stem from a particular dislike of any of the four participants (although members of the NIH communicated afterwards that they thought personal taste was the reason we objected to the choices). One of the four would have been fine - after all, their perspective need not be excluded. However, by choosing only these four, the The narrow perspective voiced by Straus, Demitrack, Wessely and Sharpe can only harden the existing biased picture of CFS/M.E within the NIH. This meeting is not insignificant; NIH has stated that the intention is to "teach" NIH decision-makers "about CFS." The meeting will have a strong influence on future NIH policy towards the disease, research funding, and the plight of patients. As Jon Sterling (former president of the NJ CFS Assoc. and current patient representative on the CFSCC) stated in a formal letter of protest, "the view of these 'experts' would take us back to 1991 in terms of scientific progress in CFS research."

and so it came to pass......
 
One of the four would have been fine - after all, their perspective need not be excluded. However, by choosing only these four, the The narrow perspective voiced by Straus, Demitrack, Wessely and Sharpe can only harden the existing biased picture of CFS/M.E within the NIH.
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It may be that none of the four had a say in who was there but the fact they were happy to go ahead in such a panel with every member having the same view reflects badly on them, I believe.

There are nearly always different ways of going about things but having taken part in presentations to clients deciding which technical path to go down one would expect to sit across from someone with expertise in a different approach and have a thoroughly challenging (& rather enjoyable) debate.
 
Yet another award for Professor Sir Wessely.



“Professor Sir Simon Wessely from [the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College], has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.”

Full list of the 63 newly elected fellows: https://royalsociety.org/news/2021/05/new-fellows-announcement-2021/
 
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