"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 says he should have listened more to patients who oppose his approach."
Sounds like some clever slight re-positioning from Wessely.
Of course, he continues to be utterly evasive when awkward facts & concerns are raised by critics who've approached him, but no need to let that get in the way of his personal brand management.
"13:40:
Yes, as you're quite right there's a lot of opposition and there always has been, but possibly getting worse. Maybe we were not, back then, 30 years ago, when we started this career and my colleagues as well, maybe we weren't attune to some of the feelings people had, I think that we probably got have dealt with that better looking back. These days we're much more better at engaging with patients than we were.
So in what way? What might you have done better?
If I had my time again, I don't know, I think we spent not enough time working with, talking with, people who didn't agree with us. It's always easier to talk to people who agree with you, but actually it's far more important to talk to people who disagree with you. And in the work we're doing now with the Mental Health Act, I remember, I really do, some of the mistakes we made all those years ago and we're determined not to repeat them. Ditto in the work with the military. But I think that we probably didn't take it as seriously as we should have done. I think we were possibly too quick to say this is about stigma and prejudice, some of it was, some of it wasn't. It maybe would have made no difference at all. We'll never know will we? But as I've got older I think that probably we could have done better.
And interestingly you say there that possibly it's getting worse, the opposition, the feeling about it. Why's that?
That is a hard one and sometimes I do find it baffling. I find the fact that I played a part, my colleagues played a bigger part in what is still, according to the NICE guidelines, the only two treatments that are found to be better than nothing in this area. They're not magic bullets, but they are better than nothing and they're certainly safe. Cognitive Behvioual Therapy, Graded Exercise, I played a part in developing the former. And still, thirty years later nothing better has come along. It probably will, I don't know where but it probably will, just because of the nature of medical advances. I do find the opposition from some quarters to these treatments which are, as I say, moderately modestly effective, I do find that sometimes surprising. On the other hand, I can also say having run a clinic for thirty years, dealt with thousands of patients, I've lost track, that actually the patients we see in the clinics in south London are fine. What they want from you is number one that you agree that they're ill, number two you don't go into a battle over diagnosis, as I say CFS exists, got it. And finally they want someone who takes it seriously, spends a lot of time with them and has got something not too stupid to offer. And actually, that's what most people seem to want. But we haven;t done the best job we can in actually telling that story, and I think that probably goes back to the fact that we also thought that the evidence will speak for itself, and I'm not sure that's true.