BBC News: Scientists working on ME/CFS are abusing and intimidating patients

BBC News: Scientists working on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), or ME, are abusing and intimidating patients.

Professor Simon Wessely, of King's College London Speaking on the programme on Friday, and ME Association's Dr Charles Shepherd condemned the abuse, but said sufferers had a justifiable complaint that no government-funded research was looking at the bio-medical aspects of the illness.

"The anger, the frustration, is the fact that all this effort, all this government-funding, has just been going to the psychological side," he said.

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[bunnygirlxxx]

Wessley was very patronising! He clearly fails to understand that patients do his silly CBT but are still incredibly ill afterwards.

Patient ARE angry with him because he keep s harping on about it!!!

Patients do not want an incurable virus! What a patronising and idiotic thing to say!

When you have tried several different psychological therapies it becomes obvious that you are psychologically well & physically ill.

[missloopsalot]

I have ME, and all I can say is anyone who thinks it's a psychological condition obviously hasn't experienced it themselves. I've had a mental health disorder in the past, and honestly, that and ME couldn't be more different.

[Wabbit0789]

@MissJaffaCake21 I've been sent to one of these M.E. C.B.T. course and i was misslead by being told it was a M.E. group :( No C.B.T. was mentioned. they treated me as if my illness was phychosomatic. mental health illness comes later (depression), usually when you've been stuck in bed for days on end (that would make any one feel depressed) I'll go as far to say none of the treatment i've ever had have helped ! They don't know how to treat it and as a M.E. sufferer i feel like a lab rat

[4anddy]

How very degrading and insulting Simon is..He has turned ME into his very own abuse story and conveniently distracted attention away from the patients who desperately need help .He claims to care but is this more about himself?

[summaoi]

No word about Wesselys position to this illness...

What I think is appalling is that he could blow up such a media-campaign against patients from nearly nothing. He just got some unfriendly e-mails, oh dear!!!

But hello, who not?!

[ShowalterdontlikeME]

@MissJaffaCake21 I’m not surprised that you have become confused while listening to Simon Wessely. He has that effect on people. However if you had listened carefully to him, you would know that he never made a claim that he had been a victim of a death threat. He just cleverly left you with the impression that he had. I think you owe ME sufferers an apology for falsely claiming they had made death threats to Sir Simon Whingalot.

[MissJaffaCake21]

Dr Wessely is not saying M.E. is a mental illness, he is simply saying that the brain is involved in a neurological sense. After all CBT is used to help people with arthritis, and no one is saying that is not a physical condition. Dr Wessely even says the treatments he prescribes are not perfect, but can help. For him to receive death threats is ridiculous, and the general public needed a better understanding of the interplay between mind a body before they make such ignorant judgements.

[TheHazeyQ]

Widdums. Poor chap. He's talking such rubbish. Where does one even start showing up his claims, it's so flawed.

[joopiter76]

Everybody knows that NOT the patients of Prof. Wessely are psychologicaly ill but HE HIMSELF should really seek some help to overcome his wrong illness beliefs!!!!

The "Wessely-Scholl" is a parasite of true medicine, ignoring all biomecial evidence that they are wrong. They spend their whole career in a NULL-Field without any scientific value. Science has already proven Simon Wessely beeing completly wrong but because of his personalyty he doesn´t realize that.

[thx1138mindlock]

I think I heard language similar to that of Simon Wessely from Nazi's about gypsies jews and those with phsyical disabilities around 70 years ago. Certainly I never hear other doctors obsess over one group of minorities and continually attack them with rhetoric that sounds paranoid and dellusional. Perhaps doctors should consider if they are perhaps mentally ill themselves before entering the field of psychiatry.