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

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inappropriate treatment and medical harm, his father had surreptitiously taken him abroad. When police
officers broke into the house, it seems they found Mrs Proctor’s name and address and she was therefore
suspected of assisting the boy’s parents in his disappearance and of harbouring him, which was untrue.
Believing his son to be safe, the father returned to the UK where he was arrested and sentenced to two years
imprisonment, a sentence he was happy to endure, thinking that his son was safe. However, the child’s
mother was then targeted and threatened with imprisonment if the boy was not handed over to a particular
psychiatrist at a Teaching Hospital. The physically sick child was forced to spend seven months under the
“care” of this psychiatrist and was subjected to “active rehabilitation”, during which time his condition
deteriorated considerably. He became severely ill and terrified of health professionals. The lengths to
which some psychiatrists who have focused their careers on “eradicating ME” will go in order to obtain
parental obedience, and the control they wield, is extremely disquieting.
In 1998 Professor Wessely seemed to be curiously affected by elective amnesia over the compulsory removal
of children with ME from their parents: his involvement with the wardship of Ean Proctor is
incontrovertibly established, yet in a Channel 4 News programme on 26 th August 1998 in which the case of
Child X was being discussed, when asked by the presenter Sheena McDonald if there can ever be a case for
the coercive approach in situations involving forcible removal of a child with ME from the parents, Wessely
stated (verbatim quote): “You know very well I know nothing about these cases” and when Sheena McDonald
asked: “So you would agree that unless there is criminal abuse, there is never a case for a coercive approach to take
children away from parents?”, Wessely replied (verbatim quote): “I think it’s so rare. I mean, it’s never happened to
me”. Despite this denial on national television, there is unequivocal evidence that Wessely was personally
involved in Ean Proctor’s wardship and that he had advised the local authorities to take the action they did.
On 13 th September 1998 Wessely repeated on air his denial of personal involvement in the removal of
children with ME from their parents (Child Abuse by Professionals; Brain Hayes; BBC Radio 5 Live).
As mentioned above, the “treatment” of sick ME/CFS children by certain psychiatrists who profess to
specialise in “CFS/ME” was the subject of a Panorama programme (“Sick and Tired”), transmitted on 8 th
November 1999 and was profoundly disturbing (a videotape recording is available).
Nothing seems to have been learnt from the appalling case of Ean Proctor and there is no question that
children with ME/CFS continue to be forcibly removed from their parents and home; this issue was raised
by Dr Nigel Speight, a consultant paediatrician at the University Hospital of North Durham with 20 years
experience of children with ME, who in April 1999 reported to the Chief Medical Officer’s Working Group
on “CFS/ME” that the frequency of psychiatrists diagnosing the parents of children with ME/CFS as having
Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy amounted to an epidemic and, a decade later, such atrocities are still
occurring.
(3) The case of a severely affected young man: in a letter dated 22 nd November 2003 the mother of a young
man severely affected by ME wrote: “The consultant in charge wrote to Dr Wessely for advice. On my son’s
hospital file is a document dated 07.03.01, a ‘Draft Action Plan Proposal following consultation with Trudie Chalder’.
I find the action plan shocking, and I was particularly disturbed by the penultimate paragraph, which states:
“ ‘We expect (her son’s name) to protest, as well as the activity causing him a lot of pain. This may result
in screams….it may feel punitive’.
“This plan has never been discussed with me. There were a number of painful incidents…he was found bleeding from
the stomach (and) had surgery in September 2001. On 18 th April 2001 I wrote to the consultant about the pain my son
must experience in having a naso‐gastric tube frequently inserted…it had been re‐inserted 11 times in the previous 7
weeks. I have no record of receiving a reply.
“The action plan also accounts for the diagnosis of ‘elective mutism’ (it will be recalled that thirteen years earlier,
Simon Wessely claimed that Ean Proctor had elective mutism). Community speech therapists have refused to
work with him on the basis that he might ‘not be compliant’.