Simon Wessely on "psychiatric hubris" (Abused Gulf War Illness Vets for years)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Simon Wessely on "psychiatric hubris" (Abused Gulf War
Illness Vets for years)
Date: Jan 11, 2010 1:31 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
==========================
That's a funny thing for Simon
Wessely to be talking about, especially
since he once published an article on
"Pride," wherein he used himself and his
"accomplishments" as a model for the
endorsement of Pride.
Wessely, everyone will recall, was the
proponent of "Gulf War Illness as Soldier
Fairitis," when, in fact, it likeliest
is like LYME-AIDS, Lyme's OspA being the
http://www.actionlyme.org/Pam3Cys_Version15.htm
same as mycoplasmal and Brucellar Pam3Cys:
http://www.actionlyme.org/ROCKET_SCIENCE.htm
http://www.youtube.com/user/KMDickson#p/a/u/0/Umwk_sTJmWk
In other words, Simon Wessely humiliated and
further injured the sick and injured who, um,
wore uniforms. We don't have a psychiatric term
or even a diagnosis code for that kind of abuse, do
we? We have no term for either the authors of
the abuse or the abusees, do we?
Add to it, "No Apology, or even admission of
his errors."
In 2008, NIAID's chief, Anthony Fauci, suddenly
decided it was time to look at what HIV's gp120
was:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/9/888
Do you find that hard to believe?
Do believe it could be true that after all
these years Fauci never sought to see the
structure of HIV's gp120?
- - - -
"Justin's [Martyr] chief reproach to the philosophers is their mutual
divisions; he attributes this to ***the pride of the heads of sects
and the servile acquiescence of their adherents;***
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08580c.htm
[You have to be a servile adherent of
the head of a psychiatric/psychological
sect to even advance in these "fields;" in
other words, you have to be a suck-up to
even get any kind of a "degree" in this.]
"[The Elite] ...of this country would have snored during The Sermon on
the Mount but they'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree"
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgYue-aP_s
A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More
I think it is stunning for Simon Wessely
to be talking about psychiatric hubris
and their inability to get anything right
when we don't know a better example of
the inability to get anything right and
psychiatric hubris than Simon Wessely.
One thing Wessely is, is a model for
cowardice, lack of accomplishment, and
total philosophical incoherence. Worse,
perhaps, is that the AMA and the APA (and
the NIH), by their silence, applauds
it.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
- - - - -
http://jrsm.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/full/99/11/552
Essays
Commentary: the psychiatry of hubris
Simon Wessely
King's Centre for Military Health Research, Institute of Psychiatry,
King's College London, London SE5 9RJ, UK
E-mail: s.we...@iop.kcl.ac.uk
The medical profession in general, and the psychiatric profession in
particular, have moved away from the liberal use of descriptive,
usually pejorative, terms to describe people who are difficult,
dangerous, or different. It is over 40 years since psychiatry
abandoned the concept of hysterical personality disorder, ever since
Paul Chodoff showed that it was simply a caricature of male views of
femininity. We no longer use ‘psychopath’ simply to mean a nasty piece
of work, and we leave megalomaniac to the script writers for James
Bond.
Indeed, psychiatrists are increasingly cautious about entering into
the minefield of understanding the minds of prominent people, let
alone predicting their behaviour. During the Waco siege the FBI
commandeered a group of psychiatrists and locked them in a hotel room
until they had predicted the likely behaviour of David Koresh, the
cult leader. The one thing on which they were agreed was that Koresh
would not commit suicide, which is what he did. It is rumoured that
the same psychiatrists later predicted that Saddam Hussein would
prefer suicide to capture, which he did not. It is territory that few
mental health professionals care to tread.
I have myself dabbled in these dark arts on occasions—in Roger
Chickering's recent biography of General Erich Ludendorff, the man who
steered the German Army to defeat in the First World War, and whose
oft iterated and fanatical views on why the Jews and Freemasons, and
not himself, had led to this outcome, were such that even Hitler
thought he was cranky—I am cited as the source for the observation
that the General and his even more bizarre psychiatrist wife were ‘not
mad, but the kind of person you wouldn't want to sit near at a dinner
party’. But Ludendorff is safely dead.
However, neither the general public nor politicians show any such
compunction. Our current media psychiatrist, Raj Persaud, took Jack
Straw to task for calling suicide bombers ‘crazy’ and Bin Laden
‘psychotic’. Both observations were factually untrue, impeded rather
than assisted understanding, and stigmatized those who are genuinely
psychotic, but I suspect that neither the now ex-Foreign Secretary nor
the public paid Raj much attention.
And now another ex-Foreign Secretary swims in the same dangerous
waters. However, this is no politician using psychiatric terminology
because he knows no better. As most people will know, David Owen
qualified as a doctor, and came perilously close to a career in
psychiatry. Indeed, if he had taken the SHO post he was offered at the
Maudsley he might have ended up where I am now.
Putting aside that tantalizing ‘what if’—or ‘counter factual’, as
historians call it—in recent years Lord Owen has returned to his
roots, and has become increasingly fascinated with the question of how
illness influences history via the health of politicians. That raises
a host of ‘what ifs’ well beyond the early career of David Owen. What
if Woodrow Wilson had not had the stroke when he did—would America
have ratified the Treaty of Versailles and hence not started twenty
years of isolationism, until Pearl Harbour reminded them they were a
superpower after all? Would Stalin have managed to hoodwink Roosevelt
at Yalta had the latter not been on his death bed? Or my favourite—
what if Sir Morrell McKenzie, the best ENT surgeon in Europe, had not
diagnosed influenza when called on to explain the hoarseness of the
still youthful Crown Prince Friedrich, but instead the early stages of
the throat cancer that would kill the heir to the German throne almost
as soon as he had come to power? In that case we would have been
spared his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, with his dangerous combination of
withered arm, blind ambition, reckless misjudgements, and jealousy of
the British Empire. There might have been no naval arms race and no
First World War, at least not involving us.
But physical health is always simpler than mental health, and now Lord
Owen has gone beyond his previous studies of the physical or
neurological health of the good and great, to consider their
psychological make up. In particular he draws on the Greek concepts of
hubris and nemesis as a way of understanding what many of us struggle
to understand: the minds of Bush and Blair.
Lord Owen lands some heavy blows, finding them guilty of numerous sins
of pride, over-confidence and messianic zeal, a case he makes at
greater length and with numerous insights from his own career and
interactions in the book of which this paper is a part. But it is
inevitable that in seeking to make his case, he must over-emphasize
the personal at the expense of the political. Just how much do the
failures in Iraq owe to Bush's pride, and how much to the complex
political agendas of Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, and their neo-
conservative Cold War gurus such as Albert Wolstetter?
It is often said that all political careers begin brightly, and end in
failure. But are all politicians doomed to make the journey from
success, via hubris, to nemesis? Hubris is excessive pride that leads
in Greek tragedy to the downfall of the hero, when he meets his
nemesis. But the hubristic hero must first have carried out great
deeds, which makes the subsequent nemesis all the more tragic. When
Ajax accuses Achilles of hubris in book nine of the Iliad, there is no
doubting Achilles' previous feats and valour. It is always a mistake
to underestimate George Bush, but not even his closest admirers could
call him a war hero.
But which David Owen has the most telling insights: is it Owen the
doctor, or Owen the politician? It must be the latter. Understanding
the motivations and mind set of our leaders will be the historian's
task, not the psychiatrist's. Personal issues may play a larger role
in the grand scheme of events than we care to admit—who knows how
historians will unravel the tangled web of rivalry between Number 10
and Number 11 and how that influenced decision making? But the
historian who comes to weigh up Blair's Wars will need to take into
account a far wider range of factors, political, social, economic,
cultural and much else besides. David Owen's own observations of Blair
at his zenith will be part of this reckoning, and his analysis of
events demands and receives respect. But will this future historian
also draw on the findings of cognitive neuroscience, as David Owen
suggests, to unlock the secrets of Blair's mind? I doubt it. Owen the
doctor gives us some insight into the characters and motivations of
the powerful, but it is Owen the politician who delivers the most
compelling verdicts.
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared.
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