2014 Impact case study - Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) - CFS

[Esther12]

where did he say this?

It was a transcript of a recent podcast that gave me that impression.

Maybe these notes:

Yes, it is from 12.45 - 16.35

Here are some notes I took while listening..

He says of course CFS exists and that psychological factors can affect the outcome as with all chronic illnesses.
Maybe they were not attuned to some of the feelings people had and could have done better. These days they are much better.
They didn't spend enough time talking to people who didn't agree with them and were too quick to say it was about stigma and prejudice.
He played a part in the NICE guidelines and they are better than nothing and certainly safe. He finds some of the opposition to the treatments, that are modestly effective, surprising. The patients they see are fine. They haven't done the best job they could to tell that story and thought the evidence would speak for itself.

https://www.s4me.info/threads/rsm-t...hallenges-for-mental-health.5568/#post-100724

There was a bit about not talking enough to those they disagreed with in this interview from the same time too:

But it hasn't all been plain sailing. He stopped studying ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, years ago, after suffering a backlash from a faction of sufferers who believed the illness was a purely physical condition. His research, carried out with colleagues, found combining cognitive behavioural therapy with light exercise brought about a full recovery in a third of patients.

Simon doesn't regret researching the syndrome - "Absolutely not, I'm quite certain we did a lot of good" - but thinks changes could have been made. "We spent too much time with people we agreed with and not enough with people we didn't agree with. We believed the evidence would speak for itself, and it didn't."

The impact on his life endures. "It's not been pleasant. It's a difficult area for me to talk about. I would describe it as stalking, unpleasant ways of people trying to interrupt your career, incite hostility, threats."

https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/heal...hood-and-life-as-a-top-psychiatrist-1-9331473

There was this, but it is not entirely clear.
www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)60802-2/fulltext

With hindsight he admits “I could have been more diplomatic. I wasn’t thinking about the language I used or its impact. I was just keen to get into print.” He understands why patients would prefer to be told they’ve acquired a virus. Nowadays, he reckons, he can make a better fist of handling controversy.

EDIT to include quote and to add this

Sometimes when one looks back, one gets a sense of “why on earth did I do that?”. But not in this case. Yes, one would do some things a little differently. And yes, my writing style has improved over twenty years. But overall, I think that we (and like all medical research, it most definitely was a “we”) achieved quite a lot for the benefit of medicine and patients.
www.simonwessely.com/index.php/cfs-personal-story/

He appears to think that the problem may have been one of form, not substance. I am not sure many would agree.

I thought that his more recent comments had indicated a bit of a move on from that earlier spin from Wessely, but now I'm not even sure I actually listened to the podcast I cited, so maybe I was getting ahead of myself.

 

[rvallee]

With hindsight he admits “I could have been more diplomatic. I wasn’t thinking about the language I used or its impact. I was just keen to get into print.” He understands why patients would prefer to be told they’ve acquired a virus. Nowadays, he reckons, he can make a better fist of handling controversy.

So he just wished he was more deceitful with regards to his intent and what he truly believes. He just wished there wasn't a decades-long record of him and his colleagues making mutually contradictory assertions (backed by no more than "may be"s and "could be"s), in speech but also in his published work.

"Diplomacy" isn't a concern here and we don't have any preferences as to the cause, we just want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This is what frustrates me the most about the psychosocial model: it's entirely deceitful, it hides its true intent and purpose. This is something that has no place in science, even less in medicine.

This is the fundamental thing that needs to be done to fix this disaster: STOP LYING! Medicine cannot work from a starting point of hiding your intent to the patient and straight into official clinical guidelines. It's even in the damn official documents used by practitioners that it is recommended to lie to them ("diplomatically", of course) by pretending to acknowledge that there is a disease then work right back to fixing this incorrect belief. It builds "trust" just like a con artist does.

All that is given away in other documents like the Christmas guide we saw recently: "there is no disease" and the placement of these services within mental health services. It's not even a convincing lie, it's all implausible denial. If lying was not permitted none of this would have happened and millions of lives would not have been destroyed on the hubris of mediocre narcissists.