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