MAGICAL MEDICINE: HOW TO MAKE AN ILLNESS ... - Invest in ME

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16. As noted above, therapists and research nurses are constantly urged that in order to improve
compliance, they should show warmth and empathy towards participants, which seems to border on
dishonesty because it is insincere. The objective appears to be to ensure that the participants are doing the
therapists’ bidding.
Therapists are trained to say to participants, for example, words to the effect of: “You may have had bad
experiences before, but we know you’re really ill and are on your side”; this seems duplicitous and
fundamentally misleading because it is not genuine.
This emphasis on false warmth pervades these Manuals and is believed by many to be reprehensible: it
has overtones of the Stockholm syndrome, in that the motive seems to be deliberately to induce an
emotional attachment to the therapist who is exhibiting such warmth and empathy so that the
participants will want to trust and please the therapist.
Throughout the Manuals, the emphasis seems to be on how to accomplish indoctrination of the Wessely
School’s beliefs about “CFS/ME”.
It seems that therapists are instructed to mislead people either directly or indirectly, which seems to
mean that those responsible for the PACE Trial have instructed NHS personnel to misinform sick
people. Can this be ethical?
For example, page 125 of the Participants’ CBT Manual (information for relatives) states: “It is important to
stress that any increase of symptoms is both a normal and temporary side effect that occurs because they are doing
more”.
This is another assumption stated as fact, but this is the very hypothesis that the PACE Trial is testing,
not a proven fact, so is it not misleading to state it as fact?
Assumptions stated as fact in the Manuals need to be addressed because they show that:
• the PACE Trial Investigators and therapists seem to have no understanding of the scientific process
• they seem to be misinforming patients and relatives which, if so, is unethical.
If information is withheld and patients and relatives are misinformed, choice becomes reduced, thereby
enhancing the control afforded to and exerted by the therapist and ultimately by the Wessely School, the
State and the the multi‐national corporations that now dominate and control medical and research
institutions and whose life‐blood is profit (Politics isn’t working. Channel 4, 13 th May 2001). In their
portrayal of ME/CFS as a mental illness, Wessely School psychiatrists and their colleagues are
misleading PACE trial participants and therapists alike.
The abundance of misrepresentation about ME/CFS shows that the MRC and DWP are funding research
based on the belief that “CFS/ME” (which the PACE Trial Investigators insist is the same as ME/CFS) is a
mental health problem, when to do so is deemed by many to be unethical. It seems that no amount of
scientific evidence will influence the Wessely School’s beliefs about “CFS/ME”, or their on‐going intention to
re‐classify it as a mental disorder.
For example, in 2003, Simon Wessely asserted that neither he nor his group had any intention of
reclassifying ME/CFS as a mental disorder (despite the Institute of Psychiatry – using Wessely’s own
material ‐‐ having attempted to do so in 2000 by including it in the Guide to Mental Health in Primary Care):
“Probably nearly all (GPs) accept that there are important psychological and social issues surrounding CFS. The
question of classification and the WHO is a storm in a teacup. There is no desire to see CFS as an exclusively mental