Who is Simon Wessely?

Older teens face a choice between a terrifyingly competitive employment market or taking on record amounts of debt to go to university. Racism and misogyny are rife, the planet is dying and we may very well be on the brink of WW3.

In other words, many children are growing up in an environment where not only is everything scarier and more pressured, but the things which would allow them to cope have been taken from them.
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That is so ridiculous. There has never been a time when the world was all roses and joy.

But this can only be read as an admission of failure for his model, which I doubt he understands or would agree with. It's true that mental health care is terrible and doesn't deliver. But it should be improved, not cancelled. The man has made a career out of psychologizing real illnesses, and this is a huge part why mental health services are struggling so hard. They're inundated with people who have medical issues that those services cannot handle. Which in return floods medical services with the same patients, whose problems are never fixed but more resources are wasted for worse results in a never-ending loop of failure.

Wessely is the person who trashed the house and complains that it's very messy. His approach reminds of a hilarious quote I saw about U2: in trying to make music that everyone likes, they ended up making music that nobody likes. People like him have only degraded the quality of medicine with generic trash. The best way forward would be to can this horrible biopsychosocial model and the people responsible for it, and reform the traditional top down aristocratic/technocratic model of health care. That he remains influential is such absurd failure.
 
It's psych! It's not psych!

Too late, Sir Simon Says. This is the drearily predictable fruits of your decades of reckless unrestrained psychopathophilia. From day one you were spreading the psych gospel way too hard, way too early, way ahead of any robust evidence, installing this crap in every nook and cranny of power you could find, and this is the inevitable outcome.

You cannot blame others for that.
 
All physical symptoms are signs of mental illness, but mental illness doesn't exist. Handy in getting rid of the pesky patients, but he may not have quite thought this out if he wants to hang on to his esteemed career.

These musings might draw attention, and some journalists and colleagues might start digging and find out that his eminence is built on sand.
 
MEMarge said:
Does anyone know who Wessely and co use as lawyers?
For instance, the Tribunal where it was decided that PACE trial data, or a portion of it, could be released, c 2015. This followed Alem Mathees FOI request.

All info re above or any other instances gratefully received by person asking the question.

@Valerie Eliot Smith
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Thanks for the mention @MEMarge. I'd seen this question at its original source.

The question itself is something of a red herring as anyone could simply raise it directly as part of an initial inquiry to a law firm. If a potential conflict of interest were to become apparent later on, the lawyer(s) concerned would be under a duty to disclose it.

Client confidentiality is an issue so the main routes for discovering which firms might have represented any member of the psych lobby (a very wide grouping) would be through:

a) Having authorised access to information about a case

b) The information appearing in a published judgment where the legal representatives of each party are given

c) Reliable anecdotal information

Random searches might come up with something but it would be a long task and might yield nothing useful. Consultations with lawyers which have not resulted in further action would not normally be visible.

Simon Wessely was not directly involved in the FOI Tribunal hearing that you mention. According to my blog post of that time, QMUL was represented by solicitors Mills & Reeve https://valerieeliotsmith.com/2016/...d-matthees-tribunal-hearing-and-open-justice/

ETA: Simon's son, Alex, works at Leigh Day solicitors. This is the firm that represented the two ME patients, Fraser and Short, in the 2009 judicial review of the 2007 NICE guideline (way before Alex joined). It was a disaster. Avoid.
 
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Hutan said:
:rofl:
That video reminds me a lot of Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk. It would be laughable if it were not presenting such a warped view of Long Covid recovery. Actually, it's still laughable.
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It’s rather fake isn’t it. And for them it’s ‘all the cliches rolled into one’. It seems like comedy a parody of a real investigative report . Would love Diane Morgan to to a few programmes on this taking the mick out of their techniques she’d do a brilliant job

Or Like someone who’s to put together an advert to tackle bad press - in that vein I almost imagine being a teenager at school having such tasks to do as a group, or when you are learning to do short videos course and have to as a group put together something a few mins long

it’s almost like even they as the makers don’t believe themselves and have their tongue in cheek at getting away with saying what they do
 
Amw66 said:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1842706744796938710



Twenty-one years ago today. @TheScotsman, 6th October 2003. Apparently the piece that got Margaret Cook allegedly sacked from the paper after @WesselyS complained.
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I’ve been waiting to read this a long while. Thanks for sharing.

No need to throw sex workers under the bus I can’t help feel and I don’t think SW was ‘blind to’ anything. But these are still and certainly were very common linguistic habits. So I’ll put those aside and move on to the content.


This is amazing. So straight forward and brief and yet manages to say so much about the political landscape and the power dynamics. About the character, politics and writing style of SW.

So ethically Margaret Cook was on the correct side against the mischaracterisation and exploitation of people with ME, and about corruption in medicine more broadly.


If (we say if do we details unconfirmed?) MC was fired for this, that is mistreatment of herself, a tragedy for people with ME and their families
going by this writing.
 
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Rhi Belle writing at the Trans Safety Network: Simon Wessely’s history of discrediting sick and disabled people could be bad news for trans health research priorities

Reviews SW's history through the lens of research and care implications for transgender young people.

We hope this history of serving ideological interests has not played a role in Wessely's appointment to the Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Research Oversight Board. However, given the widespread sharing of pseudoscientific social contagion theories and the discredited ROGD theory by anti-trans actors, including clinicians, and the poor quality of the Cass review, we are concerned about the quality and direction that research could take with Wessely's involvement and oversight. We view Wessely’s appointment in the context of the history of partisan appointments of others in positions of involvement and oversight in developing guidelines for gender care that have already created harmful levels of epistemic injustice. Transphobic actors also have a habit of weaponising sanism against trans people and patients, sometimes with eugenicist undertones. They also often exhibit broader aspects of disablism.
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In Trans Safety Network’s opinion, there is a danger of Simon Wessely claiming that being trans is a form of socially contagious psychosomatic illness.
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