LAST week, over 65 deaf and disabled people’s organisations, campaigns and mental health professionals wrote to the Prime Minister asking her to urgently rethink her decision to appoint Professor Sir Simon Wessely to lead the much-anticipated independent review of the Mental Health Act as announced in her speech at the Conservative Party conference on October 4.

Wessely’s body of work on myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome), and his conduct in relation to people with ME, make him resoundingly unfit to lead an inquiry into the Mental Health Act. 

ME is a poorly understood illness, believed by most researchers in the field to have a physical cause. But the “psychiatrisation” of ME through a cognitive-behavioural approach to the illness led by Wessely since the late 1980s has resulted in treatment (particularly graded exercise therapy, or GET) which can be harmful and even coerced, in the stigmatisation of patients and let to the frequent denial of their entitlement to social security and support.

Wessely has consistently promoted the unsubstantiated suggestion that ME is caused or maintained by patients’ false illness beliefs and abnormal behaviour. 

As a result, the integrity of patients’ experience of this devastating illness been destroyed as their testimony is deemed unreliable. 
This form of “epistemic injustice” (according to medical ethics scholars Blease et al) has seen people with ME derided within the medical profession  and wider society for misperceiving, exaggerating, even creating their own illness. 

Wessely’s approach to ME involves treatment with GET, aimed at reversing the physical consequences of what he sees as their dysfunctional behaviour. 

Nearly 50 per cent of people with ME surveyed reported that treatment with GET made their condition worse. 

Yet Wessely and his colleagues are silent on the subject or dismiss patient experience as unreliable evidence or poor treatment compliance. 

As a result, thousands of people with ME have received NHS treatment informed by his model that has further damaged their health.

Wessely continues to defend the notorious Pace trial, a study into CBT and GET treatment for ME/CFS part-funded by the Department for Work and Pensions and widely condemned by academics for misuse of statistical methods in order to produce positive-looking results.

Wessely’s involvement in media discussions about ME has further suppressed patients’ voices. Following the publication of results from the Pace trial, Wessely and his colleagues responded to concerns about their work by taking part in media campaign which promoted prejudice and led to those patients who had identified serious methodological and statistical problems being dismissed as irrational extremists motivated by anti-psychiatry. 

The Science Media Centre, for which Wessely is a trustee, has played a key role in promoting misleading information about the Pace trial, and smearing critics.

During the 1990s Wessely advised the DWP (then DSS) that classifying ME as a neurological illness, as the World Health Organisation does, would perpetuate patients’ false beliefs, prolong their illness and result in a deluge of disability claims. 

The influence of Wessely and his colleagues on DWP training manuals on CFS/ME has undoubtedly resulted in a disability assessment system biased against people with ME and caused them great additional difficulty in accessing support with the extra costs of their disability. 

The work of Jonathan Rutherford reveals how Wessely was among a group of medical and insurance industry professionals whose work on “malingering and illness deception” influenced the DWP’s understanding of ill-health and disability.  

Wessely and his colleagues shaped the ideology underpinning the disastrous work capability assessment (WCA) known as the “biopsychosocial model.” According to Professor Tom Shakespeare and colleagues who have exposed the poor science underpinning the biopsychosocial model, this approach to disability effectively blames disabled people seeking social security support for their own misfortune. 

The WCA has had a devastating impact on the lives of disabled people as part of a package of welfare reforms leading, in the words of the UN disability committee, to “human catastrophe.”

All of these activities amount to an abuse of power by Wessely against people with ME. His thoughts and actions have led to stigma, iatrogenesis and a denial of their rights to support, all of which have compounded the burden of this illness immeasurably.