Wesselys Words Revisited

[Guest guest]

Wessely’s Words Revisited

Malcolm Hooper

30th July 2011

with acknowledgement to

members of the ME community

Tom Feilden’s notably excited introduction to his interview

with Professor Simon Wessely about the disorder ME on

the BBC’s Today programme on 29th July 2011 exemplified

a failure to exercise the requisite journalistic neutrality

when reporting a *story* (http://bbc.in/peWOIi).

Feilden seemed excessively eager to inform the nation

about Wessely’s claims of how he, a genuine scientist, is

harassed and threatened by patients with ME to the

extent that his mail has to be routinely scanned before he

is allowed to access it and how he needs police protection

as he has received death threats.

A dramatic and disturbing story by Wessely, but is it true or

is it, as some people believe, an attempt to denigrate sick

people and direct attention away from the ever-growing

body of biomedical evidence which invalidates his own

now-disproven beliefs about the disorder?

When challenged in the past to provide actual evidence –

corroborated by the police -- of such threats to his life,

did Wessely produce any evidence?

The police take death threats seriously so each would be

allocated a crime incident number. Have any of these

alleged death threats been substantiated? Have there ever

been any prosecutions and have they ever been reported

in the press?

What must Wessely’s *protection* cost the nation in the

currently straightened economic climate, and do a few

immoderate emails and postings on the internet by

desperate patients pushed to the brink by Wessely’s

consistent denial of the very existence of the disease from

which they suffer warrant such costly *protection*?

As for the *threats* allegedly suffered by Professor Myra

McClure and Dr Esther Crawley, it seems they may be a

matter of interpretation.

Quite certainly, it is known that Professor McClure has

dealt with a correspondent’s valid concerns about her work

by sending a receipt six weeks later which said *Your

message was deleted without being read*

(http://tinyurl.com/3pftbtl) and Dr Crawley has admitted

that she has not received explicit death threats but has

interpreted one email in particular to constitute a death

threat. (http://bbc.in/omymZG).

Feilden seemed unaware that claiming vilification and abuse

by ME patients is a regular pattern of behaviour exhibited

by Wessely over the years, usually when yet more

published evidence further disproves his belief that ME is

perpetuated by patients wrongly attributing their

symptoms to a physical disease.

At such times, Wessely often appears to deflect media

attention away from the emerging biomedical science by

portraying himself as the victim of endless harassment

from vicious and intimidating ME patients.

Is such behaviour not one of the tactics of denial used by

*deniers* and *revisionists* of whatever discipline?

It is common practice for *deniers* to claim that *pressure

groups* are active against them and are attacking both

them and the truth and to claim that there are

*orchestrated campaigns* against them

(*The Mental Health Movement: Persecution of Patients?

Background Briefing for the House of Commons Select

Health Committee*. Professor M. Hooper; December 2003:

http://bit.ly/rj5k6S).

Can it be co-incidence that this latest well-orchestrated

campaign of media coverage of the alleged threats to

Wessely and his colleagues who share his views about ME

has been mounted hard on the heels of the publication by

Carruthers et al of the International Consensus Criteria for

diagnosing ME compiled by 26 researchers and clinicians

from 13 countries (Journal of Internal Medicine; Accepted

Article: doi:10.1111/j.1365-2796.2011.02428.x)?

The sound biomedical evidence upon which those criteria

are based completely vitiates the belief of Wessely and

colleagues about the psychiatric nature of ME, so what

does he do?

He once again claims he is being vilified and threatened by

patients with ME and he publicly denigrates and *attacks*

them by asserting that they would rather have a disease

caused by a retrovirus than admit they suffer from a

mental disorder.

There are many who hold that it is Wessely et al who are

orchestrating a media campaign against patients with ME,

not the other way round.

The campaign to *eradicate* ME by Wessely et al cannot

be denied and the documented referenced evidence can

be accessed at: http://bit.ly/q0sTBR

In 1990 Wessely asserted that ME exists *only because

well-meaning doctors have not learnt to deal effectively

with suggestible patients* (Psychological Medicine

1990:20:35-53).

In 1991, he cited medical comments made between 1880

and 1908 on patients with neurasthenia, with the very

clear implication that such descriptions apply equally well

to today’s ME patients:

*always ailing, seldom ill; a useless, noxious element of

society; purely mental cases; laziness, weakness of mind

and supersensitiveness characterises them all; the terror

of the busy physician* (BMB 1991:47:4:919-941).

His dismissal and rejection of the biomedical evidence on

ME has continued unabated.

On 6th October 2003 in her regular column *Doctor’s

Notes*, Dr Margaret Cook, former wife of the late Robin

Cook MP, wrote an article about Simon Wessely in The

Scotsman entitled *ME sufferers have found an enemy in

Wessely – so they need friends*, commenting:

*It seems that he has been central to the psychiatric

perspective that ME does not exist at all, and that the

related *Chronic Fatigue Syndrome* is a mental condition

best managed by a psychiatric therapeutic approach…. He

has downplayed the need for research into diagnostic

markers… and such is his influence that no state funding is

forthcoming to support any other research than his own….

You can tell… that he is used to dictating principles and

having everyone in his orbit humbly accept his gospel…

When you have enemies like him, you need a powerful lot

of friends*.

Wessely was both hurt and angry by that article and he

demanded its retraction and an apology from The

Scotsman, which meekly complied and as a result of his

threats of litigation duly dispensed with the services of Dr

Cook as a columnist.

Of note in relation to Feilden’s broadcast is that in

Wessely’s reply to Dr Cook published in The Scotsman, he

stated he had spent 15 years of his life looking after

sufferers from ME.

That does not chime with the fact that for the most part

he has denied the very existence of ME – how many other

*caring* doctors have amused themselves by

orchestrating a campaign in the BMJ about *non-diseases*

and proposed that ME be one of those *non-diseases*,

along with freckles and big ears, as happened in 2002?

Patients with ME know what Wessely really thinks about

them, as his published views leave no room for doubt or

conjecture (for illustrations of his descriptions of ME/CFS

patients, see *Quotable Quotes about ME/CFS*:

http://bit.ly/qR9pLi).

Later in October 2003, Wessely asserted that those who

disagree with him and believe that ME is an organic

disorder -- to whom he referred as *the radicals* -- are

(quote) *crazy* and that they are *engaged in fantasies,

lies and gross distortions*, that the *radicals* are left

*fighting yesterday’s battles* (seemingly because he

believes he has established that ME does not exist except

as a false belief), that they need a *reality check* and

*their behaviour is outrageous* (private communication).

Those words hardly concur with his claims to be a caring

clinician who has looked after people with ME all his

professional life.

Responding to Wessely’s claims of vilification and

denigration by patients with ME that he made seven years

ago, in his letter of 7th January 2004 to The Scotsman, Dr

Greensmith pointed out:

*It is deplorable if he has been so treated, no matter how

controversial his views. It is instructive, however, to

examine how Professor Wessely has raised passions to this

level of fervour by, perhaps, more than any other single

individual, being responsible for making the area as

controversial as it is*.

Referring to Wessely’s use of the term *battleground*, in a

letter of 9th January 2004 to The Scotsman, DM

pointed out:

*It is astonishing that he seemingly is blind to the fact that

that this situation has arisen almost entirely due to his

own prolific output and that of his like-minded

collaborators, denying the existence of ME on the one

hand and reclassifying (his) preferred term ‘CFS’ as a

mental and behavioural disorder in the ‘WHO Guide to

Mental Health in Primary Care’ on the other…. Professor

Wessely should be held accountable for his own role in this

controversy over CFS/ME, which provides the basis for this

‘battleground’ and which has had such disastrous

consequences for so many patients*.

Importantly, as noted, Wessely has stated:

*Right from the start, ME has been identified with a refusal

to accept the doctor’s verdict* (Co-Cure EDU: 9th

January 2004).

drew attention to the dictum of Sir Osler:

*Listen to the patient. He is telling you his diagnosis*,

commenting that Wessely’s name *threatens to stand as

the epitome of physicians who refuse to listen to their

patients*.

In another letter of 9th January 2004 to The Scotsman, Dr

ph Lenz, a clinical psychologist, hit the nail on the

head:

*Science has no greater enemies that those who seek to

confuse an issue, and those who create the most

confusion are invariably those who believe that they

already know the truth* (Co-Cure EDU: 10th January

2004).

This being so, can – or should -- one take at face value

what Wessely says?

One moment Wessely states, as he did on 12th May 1994

in his 9th Eliot Slater Memorial Lecture: *I will argue that

ME is simply a belief, the belief that one has an illness

called ME* - but ten years later he states, as he did in his

article in the Scotsman on 5th January 2004: *I have been

saying for 15 years that this is a real illness*.

Clearly both statements cannot be true.

Presently, Wessely has seized the opportunity to weave

the theme of his alleged personal harassment into his

responses in the current issue of Nature Reviews

Neuroscience published online on 27th July 2011

(Viewpoint: Chronic fatigue syndrome: understanding a

complex illness: doi:10.1038/nrn3087): in answer to the

question *What is the best way for the field to make

progress?*, his answer was:

*So long as decent clinical and basic scientists continue to

engage with the field it will make progress, although sadly

that no longer includes myself…. The ongoing antagonism

that has been directed towards so many of the scientists

who failed to replicate the original (XMRV) finding and who

thus came up with what the extremists see as the ‘wrong

answer’ has alienated yet another group of scientists from

getting involved in this area*.

What Wessely and the media fail to acknowledge is that it

was the utterly triumphant and contemptuous comments

of certain of those scientists whose studies failed to

replicate the original XMRV study published in Science

(2009:326:585-589) that so incensed some people with

ME, many of whom have daily to run the gamut of

undisguised disdain amounting to abuse meted out by

those who are supposed to be supporting and helping them

cope with a devastating disease.

In the interests of common justice, Tom Feilden would do

well to investigate the reasons why people with ME are so

angry by checking the easily verifiable facts and then to

redress the balance by reporting with equal enthusiasm

the other side of the *battleground* because, compared

with Wessely’s 25-year campaign of dismissal and

denigration of extremely sick people that has resulted in no

appropriate healthcare provision and in the relentless

harassment by the DWP of people with ME, there may be

those who consider that, whilst abusive emails and death

threats are never in any circumstances to be condoned,

complaints to the GMC are entirely understandable and

legitimate.