Who is Simon Wessely?

[SugarSquared]

If a 4-year old gets cancer, that’s very unlikely to be psychosomatic.
Fron what I understood, it’s because the kid is living their best life without being overly affected by socialization.
Now, if it happens to be a woman in her 40‘s, working, with kids, stressed out, lots of responsibilities, and some sort of tummy cancer… oh boy!!

I have a friend whose friend died of colon cancer (if I remember correctly). She was in her 30s, married with 2 kids. She was told that her pain was anxiety. It was only investigated when it was too late. Being Indigenous on top of being a woman probably contributed to her not being believed.

Sadly, being a child doesn't protect Indigenous people in the slightest. A four-year old Inuk kid in Northern Québec died despite being brought to see health care workers multiple times.

 

[Sean]

I have a friend whose friend died of colon cancer (if I remember correctly). She was in her 30s, married with 2 kids. She was told that her pain was anxiety. It was only investigated when it was too late. Being Indigenous on top of being a woman probably contributed to her not being believed.

Similar story here. Friend who was indigenous, young, and female, compounded by her being a fairly shy unassertive person, had persistent gut pain and disrupted bowel movements written off as psychosomatic. Until somebody finally checked it objectively with some basic routine testing, and discovered late stage bowel cancer that killed in her mid-30s. That was only a bit over a decade ago.

Unbelievable it still happens in a country with an advanced modern health care system. But clearly it does.

 

[SugarSquared]

Similar story here. Friend who was indigenous, young, and female, compounded by her being a fairly shy unassertive person, had persistent gut pain and disrupted bowel movements written off as psychosomatic. Until somebody finally checked it objectively with some basic routine testing, and discovered late stage bowel cancer that killed in her mid-30s. That was only a bit over a decade ago.

Unbelievable it still happens in a country with an advanced modern health care system. But clearly it does.

I’m sorry you also know someone who died this way.

 

[Chandelier]

Already plenty of comments:

Post in thread 'Broken Battery Updates'

Yesterday at 2:52 PM

Bluesky / XCancel:

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Today marks 25 years since 9/11. 8 months after the attack, psychiatrist Simon Wessely argued that illness reported around Ground Zero was being wrongly attributed to environmental toxins, suggesting “World Trade Centre Syndrome” was driven by social and psychological factors.​

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Tens of thousands of people got sick, and many have died since then from illnesses...​

• Chandelier

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A comment on Twitter mentions Gustave Le Bon as father of Wessely‘s wet dreams:

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Anna Reiser @anna_reise87030​

His ideas seem to be rooted in the 19th century, psychology of crowds.
Gustave Le Bon claimed that crowds are characterized by feminine characteristics. Unbelievable.​

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… according to Let Bon crowds are irrational, emotional, impulsive, they think in pictures etc.​

To apply that to illnesses in top of that is crazy.​

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Gustave Le Bon | History | Research Starters | EBSCOhost

<p>Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931) was a French sociologist and physician known for his influential theories on crowd psychology and social behavior. Born in Nogent-le-Rotrou and educated in Paris, Le Bon initially pursued a medical career, publishing several medical texts before shifting his focus...

www.ebsco.com

 

[Peter T]

Google AI asserts that Wessely’s work directly cites LeBon, but in the links it provided on a fairly cursory scan I could not find a direct citation. Not even in his 2018 work “Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness: From possessed nuns to chemical and biological terrorism fears” with W E Bartholomew was there an explicit reference to LeBon, which is not to say he wasn’t influenced directly or indirectly by his work.

However I had not realised how many words Wessely has given forth on the topic of what used to be called ‘mass hysteria’ without any real research underpinning. In this he follows LeBon and Freud in going from intelligent observation to complex literary fantasy.