It seems odd that a psychiatrist once described in a Times interview with Stephanie Marsh as “the most hated doctor in Britain” should suddenly become the most all-powerful doctor in that very same benighted realm – yet that is precisely what has happened. On January 27th Sir Simon Wessely took up a new role as a member of the board of NHS England, a body with responsibilities for guiding government policymaking and overseeing an NHS budget of some £152.6 billion.
For over quarter of a century Sir Simon had been a tireless advocate of something called “the biopsychosocial (BPS) model” of diagnosis and treatment. This held that sufferers from the debilitating illness ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) were not so much experiencing an adverse organic response to post-viral or post bacterial infections, or poisonous neurotoxins, as deluding themselves into believing such things by virtue of their “maladaptive beliefs” and “false cognitions”. The disorder, in other words, was psychosomatic, and so the fault lay with the patient, who should be counselled out of his or her feckless hypochondria.
In 1999 the cultural commentator Ziauddin Sardar asked how it had come about that a man who “denies the existence of Gulf war syndrome – and ME (had) a key position in our socio-medical order – who has chosen and vetted him – and by what criteria and procedures? Where is the debate over the shaping of such research?”
