Michael Sharpe skewered by @JohntheJack on Twitter

I can't say I'm surprised. A chum of Wessely asks what it's about, gets lots of response, Wessely has a quiet word in his ear, he backs off. End of story.
@Mike Godwin, I may have misunderstood. I hope I have. I frequently misunderstand tweets - you could say Twitter was designed for misunderstanding. Do join us if you want to discuss further.

Edit - looks like I was wrong - I apologise to @Mike Godwin. I really don't like Twitter for discussing anything substantial. Misunderstandings abound.
 
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Trying to exemplify humility ain't quite the same as being humble (especially if you lecture people on human nature along the way). Us professors and lawyers need to listen a bit more sometimes. These ordinary patient people know rather more what they are talking about than might appear from a cursory glance.
 
I gave it a day of my time. I've stressed consistently that anything I say must be understood in the context of the limits of my expertise. In short, I was trying to exemplify humility. Little good that did.
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I'm unable to read the full exchange which led to this, so am not sure of the context or what it means exactly.

These are questions worth asking, but I always try to begin with the presumption that even those researchers who made terrible errors were not trying to be villains. It's a rebuttable presumption.
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And when that presumption has been thoroughly rebutted and years have passed, do we still have to accept lessons in humility?
 
I think what's happened here is that Claudia has mistook a reply to someone else as a reply to her. [edit: in some formats, Twitter "helpfully" misses out the convo between your first tweet and the latest one]. But I daren't say anything, because last time I did that I got beaten to a pulp by Angela!

[update: I've gone in...]
 
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Being bombarded with @ replies on something you know very little about is at best a bit perplexing on twitter and at worst very irritating. This may have been what has happened here. No grand conspiracy, just someone who got drawn into a debate that they knew very little about and bombarded with responses.
 
I like the expression banality of evil.

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
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https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil

I still subscribe to the theory that the BPSers know exactly what they are doing and simply have no empathy or consider patients unworthy of anything but exploitation and mistreatment (in line with cruel austerity policies inflicted on the sick by the current UK government).

Maybe this banality of evil theory is a better fit though.
 
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Looks like a couple of people misunderstood Godwin's tweets and were making unfair criticisms of what he'd said. Would be useful if people could avoid doing that, or apologised promptly when mistakes were made. [edit: especially as twitter does that truncating thing, and misses out tweets, it's important to check carefully for context before jumping in with criticisms].

I think twitter is terrible for discussing topics like PACE anyway. Only seen a couple of people use it to really change other people's views, and they seemed to do so by being very gentle and cautious.
 
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Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
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Except psychologists and psychiatrists should presumably be quite good at putting themselves in the other person's shoes, and at empathy. Where are they without theory of mind, after all?
 
The other day Sharpe also tweeted something which suggested he is concerned with making sure that patients don't offload all responsibilities for getting better on the treating doctor. Which reveals a moralistic view of us patients.

So CBT/GET to him may be valuable because it separates patients into those deserving of help (those who push themselves) and those undeserving (those who give up). Whether it improves the patient's health would be irrelevant.

This is very much in line with the message that Wessely et al have been sending since the early days, namely that patients should be expected to undertake a course of CBT/GET before being given disability support.

Is CBT/GET born out of the prejudice of the common man and woman on the street that patients are lazy more than they are sick?

Or is this moralistic stance merely an excuse to make it harder for patients to obtain disability support? This is very plausible too. Those who are stereotyped as lazy and irrational are less protected from discrimination, and a clever and ruthless insurance company could promote this narrative through psychiatrists. Wessely et al do seem very concerned with influencing public health policy on ME/CFS.
 
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