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Guy Chapman Slips up

""Actually Wessely recently sent me an email offering to meet for a beer if I'm ever passing Mary's. I might even take him up on it""- Guy Chapman

Professor Simon Wessely and claims of harassment

PERMISSION TO REPOST

Below is a series of correspondence I have recently had with Professor Peter McGuffin, Dean of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, and John Williams, Interim Head of HR , at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London.

I have transcribed the correspondence by both, but have the original documents in my possession.

The contents of this correspondence are self-explanatory.

I am publishing this correspondence for two reasons:

1. I consider that I have been defamed, and seek to protect my good name and reputation against defamatory attacks of this nature.

2. This correspondence, sadly, provides merely one example of an increasingly unpleasant and worrying phenomenon. I have observed, over the years, a growing tendency, by some, to make grossly ad hominem attacks on ME/CFS advocates and the community at large. These are logically indefensible, and morally and intellectually unsound: and have had the effect of preventing reasonable, legitimate voices of criticism being acknowledged within the discourse of ME/CFS politics, with adverse consequences for sufferers. This is a phenomenon which I will return to over the coming months.

Angela Kennedy

1. Letter from Angela Kennedy to Peter McGuffin:

1st October 2007

Dear Professor McGuffin,

I am writing to you about a serious matter of defamation which potentially involves a member of your department, Professor Simon Wessely.

I am an advocate for my daughter, a young woman seriously ill and severely disabled by her illness, who was diagnosed with ME/CFS. I also politically advocate for the community at large. I am also a known critic of the ‘psychiatric paradigm’ of ME/CFS, and I undertake this from an academic perspective (I appreciate the above term might be contested, but that is not the issue at hand).

I am currently working towards publication on this issue, having been engaged in academic research for some years. I have a social science background and am an Associate Lecturer with the Open University (although the work I am undertaking in this field is not connected to this institution).

I therefore do have a reputation that might be damaged by libellous, defamatory comments.

In recent weeks, various editors of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia have expressed an intention to publish claims that Professor Wessely has ‘retired’ from ‘CFS’ research because of ‘harassment’ by certain people within the ME/CFS patient community. The basis for these claims is the Gibson Report, an unofficial, unsourced, un-referenced document, which has been criticised for key inaccuracies, and inflammatory, inaccurate language about the patient community and its advocates.

I, with other advocates, have endeavoured to provide reasons and evidence as to why the Gibson Report is not a reliable source, and why claims of ‘harassment’ are, certainly at present, unsubstantiated and unsafe to the point they should not be published on Wikipedia. One advocate has attempted to clarify, by contacting MP Ian Gibson himself, the source of the comment, within the report itself, that Professor Wessely has retired from “CFS” research, and the claim that this was ""possibly due to extreme harassment"" [my italics] present within the report. Ian Gibson’s researcher is following this up.

This is an extremely important issue. I, like many in the community, would condemn harassment of academics (particularly harassment as defined in criminal law), particularly as I am myself an academic, and because I have been subjected to criminal harassment before, which I have reported to the police. However, there is also a problem around the use of the term ‘harassment‘: ME/CFS sufferers and their advocates have for many years been subject to inaccurate ad hominem attacks on their motives for protesting the psychiatric paradigm. Inaccurate descriptions of legitimate critique as ‘personal attack’, or ‘abuse’, or terms actually associated with criminal ‘harassment’ are all too common, to the detriment of a patient community with valid concerns.

On September 26th, and 27th, 2007, a member of the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia posted a long attack on myself and others, which included the comments below, on their ‘Admin Notice board’, which were grossly misrepresentative of my work, and which