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Dangerous psychologiser Simon Wessely has a new patient group in his sights: trans kids

Infamous psychiatrist Simon Wessely, involved in a history of institutional harm towards people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), has set his sights on another marginalised patient community. This time, it’s transgender kids via the NHS. Needless to say, we can’t let him get away with it.

Simon Wessely: appointment to an NHS gender services board

The NHS has appointed psychiatrist Simon Wessely as chair of the new Children and Young People’s Gender Dysphoria Research Oversight Board.

Essentially, this is set to oversee the development and redesign of the NHS’s gender services for young people.

Significantly, a core part of this revolves around a puberty blocker study. On taking office, health secretary Wes Streeting upheld the previous Tory government’s temporary ban on these. It implemented this under emergency powers – but without consulting a single LGBTQ+ group. Ostensibly then, this study will invariably feed into the NHS’s approach to services and access to gender-affirming medications for trans kids.

However, it’s Wessely’s role as chair of the board that should send alarm bells ringing on this most of all. That’s because he’s repeatedly punched down on marginalised patient groups. So now, it’s the trans community in the firing line.

Psychologiser promoted far above his station

In a truly scathing, powerful, and unflinching piece for Trans Safety Network, disabled activist and researcher Rhi Belle pulls apart Simon Wessely’s hellish history of harm.

If you needed an example of someone in the UK’s elite medical establishment promoted far above his station, look no further than Wessely.

He already sits/has sat in a number of high profile decision-making positions. For a short run-down, this includes/has included:

  • The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government gave him a knighthood for services to military healthcare in 2013.
  • King’s College London (KCL) awarded Simon Wessely the first regius professor in psychiatry. Essentially, this is a special title bestowed by a monarch.
  • Theresa May’s government tasking him with the 2018 review of the Mental Health Act.
  • Reappointment in 2020 to the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) – which chooses who heads up inquiries.
  • The NHS appointing him to its board in 2023.

Not to mention that elite medical bodies have lavished him with multiple awards and memberships.  But this is all just the tip of the iceberg – there’s plenty more influential medical roles where all those came from.

What did he do to get himself atop these lofty roles at the heart of government and NHS policy decisions? Quite frankly, not anything good.

Punching down for a past-time

The Canary has detailed some of this previously. There’s few, if any names that send one particular chronic illness community’s spines tingling more than Simon Wessely.

Specifically, Wessely has encouraged the psychologisation of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). For the uninitiated, this has meant decades of gaslighting, neglect, and abuse of ME patients. It led to flawed study after flawed study, bunk treatment, after bunk treatment.

Crucially, this is to the point where the NHS has actively dismissed – and routinely harmed – people living with the devastating disease. Worse yet, Wessely’s work on this and his biopsychosocial (BPS) model has been – and is still – at the heart of hospitals mistreating severe ME and other chronically ill patients.

The recent inquiry of 27-year-old Maeve Boothby O’Neill has brought this to the fore. Maeve died of ME, after a litany of catastrophic NHS failures, rooted in Wessely’s very psychologisation of this serious and life-threatening chronic illness.

In particular, Wessely was involved the notorious PACE trial.

As the Canary’s Steve Topple has previously explained:

It was a study, part-funded by the UK government, into treatment for ME. It found that people could recover from the disease by having cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In other words, people living with a very-real, viral-based illness should just ‘think themselves better’. Essentially, the trial pushed the notion that the disease was part-psychosomatic or ‘made up’ by patients.

So, what was Wessely’s part in this? As we detailed before:

While Wessely wasn’t among the principal investigators, he supported and shaped the study in a number of critical ways. For one, his previous research on ME influenced the way in which the scientists carried out the study. On top of this, he was also directly involved. In particular, he sat as a centre manager for one of the trial centres, and was on the PACE Trial Management Group. The trial credited the group as one of the authors of the study.

Perhaps most significantly, Wessely was central to pushing out the PACE trial through the media.

But more than this, we’ve also underscored how this psychologisation is Wessely writ large.

He has peddled junk psychosomatic science on hysteria and Gulf War syndrome. In fact, name pretty well any under-researched chronic illness or condition under the sun and Wessely has probably psychologised it.

Ableism and misogyny in a nutshell

Belle delves even deeper into all this for the Trans Safety Network. They dredged up a play-by-play of Simon Wessely’s past preying on marginalised patient groups.

Significantly, in one telling paragraph, they hone in on his role restricting ME patients access to welfare benefits. Here was where another notorious name came into it. Specifically, Belle wrote that:

In 1993, Wessely wrote to Mansel Aylward who at the time was the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Social Security (DSS), now the DWP, complaining that ME would be listed under ‘other neurological disorders’ in the handbook of disabilities for Disability Living Allowance (DLA).

Notably, they highlighted passages of his letter to Aylward that read:

I believe that the Department is making an error if it accepts the partisan views put forward by pressure groups as a basis for making medical decisions. I also believe that it is a decision that the department will regret, since it seems likely the result will be an ever increasing stream of claims for permanent benefits in people who might otherwise have had a chance of recovery.

The Canary recently highlighted how the government looks set to draw on Aylward’s biopsychosocial model of disability in a new DWP work programme.

Meanwhile, DWP boss Liz Kendall has announced a separate, but similarly named scheme the government plans to role out. This involves putting job advisors on mental health wards in NHS hospitals. Why is this relevant? Well, Wessely cropped up here too – because it was the hospital he heads up that’s already done this.

It’s therefore evident that Wessely’s influence is still shaping chronically ill and disabled people’s access to benefits. On top of this, his school of thought is aiding the DWP in its campaign to push them back to work – even at detriment to their health.

In short then, he’s made a career of psychologising physical conditions, trivialising psychological ones, while simultaneously abetting the DWP in its crusade to deny patients of either their vital social security benefits. And to do this, his bullshit has rested on a whole lot of ableism, misogyny, and classism to boot.

Simon Wessely is NOT suitable for this role

So, the Trans Safety Network is right to worry that Simon Wessely likely got this latest gig as a result of all this.

Not content with wrecking the lives of countless people living with chronic health conditions, he has now turned his attention to the trans community.

Belle poignantly summed up the danger of a someone with a known history of psychologising and dismissing patients chairing this new board:

In Trans Safety Network’s opinion, there is a danger of Simon Wessely claiming that being trans is a form of socially contagious psychosomatic illness. The danger with this would be framing parental and clinical doubt as being in a child’s best interest. In trans and gender diverse youth, disbelief of this sort is linked to abusive conversion practices, such as cutting children and young people off from external support networks or otherwise attempting to suppress gender exploration.

That is, the implications for more unconscionable conversion therapy are crystal clear:

People from the ME community on X rightly underscored how this is a call for intersectional solidarity:

Because ultimately, wherever Simon Wessely is concerned patient harm invariably follows. So, as Belle and others noted, we must all watch his appointment with vigilance – and stand together against him in the likely event he turns his psychosomatic leanings towards trans people now too. Put simply: we can’t let trans children be his next victims.

Featured image via the Canary

By Hannah Sharland

This post was originally published on Canary.