Professor Sir Simon Wessley would like your help...

Is survey monkey really an appropriate way to investigate a matter like this? I haven't tried to respond to the survey, but it appears to be open to anyone to leave an answer whether they are qualified to or not. To me it does seem to support those who question his research skills.

 

Survey Monkey can be used for research, it’s just the platform. The quality of the questionnaire will be down to its design.

 

Presumably there should be a way of targeting the survey towards a particular audience and not everybody on the internet.

 

Q1. Are you a psychiatric trainee?
Q2. Really?
Q3 Are you sure?

 

I seem to remember Simon Wessely saying that people should not raise awareness of mental illness because there was no mental health service to deal with them. So maybe he should not ask questions of trainees that do not exist! (Or perhaps do exist but are so overworked that they will say anything in answer to a questionnaire for a quiet life.)

 

Q4. What makes you think you are a psychiatric trainee?
Q5. Can you remember when you were a potty trainee?
Q6. Do you now consider yourself a mentally sound trainee?

 

All internet surveys which are widely publicised will have this potential flaw. It relies on people being honest that they are in the targeted group. Most people will be.

An alternative strategy could be to not publicise and target relevant hospitals and universities (eg internal email rather than twitter). Otherwise you need to go as far as waiving anonymity and requesting institutional email addresses on the survey.

 

The survey is very short. It is specifically about the use of the mental health act to force patients into mental hospital to undergo treatment, ie to section them.

It would be possible for anyone to fill it in and to say, for example, that the act should never be used to detain and force harmful exercise treatment on patients with physical illnesses like ME.

 

Possible, but perhaps unwise.

Wessely is not an idiot. He must know that this form of survey is both unsound, and open to abuse. He may well be deliberately setting a trap to attract responses from outside his purported target group, so he can say: 'see that nasty disruptive minority of patients who won't play fair and just want to disrupt us completely legit honest hard-working compassionate people trying our best to help the majority of those poor suffering patients who do want to get better', etc.

You get the idea.