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

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• Deniers minimise or trivialise the distress and suffering of those with ME/CFS, alleging that
patients exaggerate their symptoms and suffering
• Deniers promote the view that patients have only themselves to blame, and that the problem is
therefore not external but internal
• Deniers often include a totally reasonable and uncontroversial supposition, (for instance, that
decisions must be based upon the best evidence), which gives the impression that their other
arguments must be equally reasonable and valid
• Deniers often suggest or imply that patients are motivated by financial or secondary gain (even
though there is not a shred of evidence to support such a claim), and that their claims for state
benefits are unjustified
• Any negative characteristics of a minority of patients are typically generalised and ascribed to all
ME/CFS patients, without any supportive evidence
• Deniers suggest or imply that patients have formidable powers, for instance that they are able to
influence certain institutions; that they get the media on their side and even that they have
managed to influence the World Health Organisation. It is also alleged that patients use such
tactics to misrepresent the situation to lead others astray
• Deniers even re‐write medical history and alter it so that it appears to support their own claims
(this is certainly demonstrable in the psychiatric interpretation of the ME literature)
• Deniers may attempt to rename or reclassify the condition (for example claiming it as a modern
form of an old (psychiatric) illness)
• Deniers make inappropriate comparisons between syndromes, suggesting that they are all simply
the same (psychiatric) syndrome, ignoring or downplaying any specific and / or unusual features
which are present.
In the case of ME/CFS, it seems irrefutable that the tactics of denial which were exposed in the Channel Four
programme mentioned above are indeed being implemented by the psychiatrists of the Wessely School; out
of the many available illustrations, just the following are provided:
• On 25 th April 2000, Dr Michael Sharpe of Edinburgh wrote a letter to Mrs Ann Crocker in which he
stated “I understand your desire to have the condition classified as a Neurological Disorder (but) trying to
change doctor’s (sic) behaviour by altering classification probably will not work and might even provoke a
paradoxical response”. The reality is that ME is already formally classified by the World Health
Organisation in the ICD as a neurological disorder, and it is Wessely School psychiatrists (not
patients) who are actively trying to “alter the classification” from neurological to psychiatric.
• On 18 th January 2000 Simon Wessely wrote to the Countess of Mar that the “ad hominen (sic) attacks”
upon him “may have the unforeseen outcome of re‐inforcing unhelpful stereotypes of sufferers held by some
in high office”. Again, this seems to be nothing less than a threat, with the use of an intimidation
technique made, it must never be forgotten, to very sick human beings who have been trying since
Wessely came to such prominence in 1987 to redress the wrongs perpetrated upon them by these
powerful medical deniers.