Sir Simon Wessely

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Sir Simon Charles Wessely Sir Simon Wessely Sir Simon Charles Wessely is a British psychiatrist and professor of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. He is also head of its department of psychological medicine, vice dean for academic psychiatry, teaching and training at the Institute of Psychiatry, as well as Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research. He was knighted in the 2013 for services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine. In 2014 he was elected president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Wessely's main current research is around various aspects of military health, including further work on the outcome of Gulf War illness, psychological stressors of military life, risk and benefits of military service, screening and health surveillance within the Armed Forces, social and psychological outcomes of ex service personnel, and historical aspects of military psychiatry. More recently, Wessely's work was the first to show that service in the 1991 Gulf War had had a significant effect on the health of UK servicemen and women. His group also confirmed that classic psychiatric injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), was not a sufficient explanation for the observed health problems. Wessely also has a long-standing interest in how normal people react to adversity, and what, if any, responses are appropriate. He was a co-author of an influential Cochrane Review showing that the conventional response – to offer people who have been involved in disaster immediate psychological debriefing – was not only ineffective, but possibly did more harm than good. In private life, Wessely is married and has two sons. His interests include skiing and history, and he cycled annually from London to Paris between 2006 and 2012, to raise money for veterans' charities. The title of Sir Simon's lecture at the DPS Annual Meeting is: "Time Bombs and Tidal Waves” .

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'Goodbye and Good Luck': the Mental Health Needs and Treatment
BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY (2005), 186, 480^486 ‘Goodbye and good luck’: the mental health needs sample consisted of three randomly selected groups of service personnel: those who and treatment experiences of British ex-service served in the Persian Gulf War in 1990– 1991 (1991(nn¼4250), those who served in Bosnia between 1992 and 1997 (nn¼4250) and an personnelpersonnel ‘Era’ group who served but were not deployed (deployed(nn¼4246). About a quarter of AMY IVERSEN, CLAIRE DYSON, NAOMI SMITH, NEIL GREENBERG, the cohort (nn¼3322) were contacted again REBECCA WALW YN, CATHERINE UNWIN, LISA HULL, MATTHEW HOTOPF, in 2001 (Hotopf et aletal, 2003). Almost all CHRISTOPHER DANDEKER, JOHN ROSS and SIMON WESSELY of those who took part in the 2001 survey (stage 3 of the investigation of this cohort) gave consent for further follow-up by Background Little is known aboutaboutthe the The war in Iraq has heightened recognition telephone.telephone. psychologicalhealth or treatment that active military service can adversely Our case group consisted of 701 in- affect the mental health of some who serve. dividuals for whom we had already collected experiences of those who have leftthe Despite this, little is known about the two waves of data, at baseline (1997) and at British armed forces. health of ex-service personnel in the UK. follow-up (2001). Inclusion criteria were After the Falklands War in 1982, several scores of 3 or more on the 12-item General Aims Todescribe the frequency and small, selective studies demonstrated poor Health Questionnaire (GHQ; Goldberg & associations of common mental disorders mental health among some returnees Williams, 1988) at stages 1 and 3 of our and help-seeking behavioursin a (O’Brien & Hughes, 1991; Orner et al,etal, original investigation (nn¼636), and all those representative sample of UKveterans 1993), but little has been published on the who were unemployed at stage 3, having left at high risk of mental health problems.
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Professor Simon Wessely MA BM Bch Msc MD FRCP Frcpsych Fmedsci a Career in Psychiatry
Professor Simon Wessely MA BM BCh MSc MD FRCP FRCPsych FMedSci A Career in Psychiatry SIMON, TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AND WHAT LED YOU TO PHYSCHIATRY I was doing medicine because I wanted to be a doctor, but I can’t remember why that was now. However, I did and I was enjoying it. I first went to Cambridge and took an art degree, but I was going through the medical curriculum and courses; then went to on to Oxford and I became more and more interested in the wider issues. It wasn’t just about pulling out drips, doing cardiac arrests and learning the more practical side of medicine, although that is crucial; I found myself being drawn to the more complicated parts of medicine and more and more into psychiatry which takes a broader view of people than just seeing them as a collection of cells or a collection of organs. Psychiatry did see people like that, but also it is the main discipline that sees people actually as people as well. And I found that fascinating. SO WHAT WHO MAKES A REALLY GOOD PSYCHIATRIST? Well psychiatrists… There are certain things that they are not! They are not normally decisive action figures like our surgeons like to think of themselves. We are a little bit more patient, a little bit more reflective, but I think most of all we are more curious about people; how they are; how they think; what they do’ what is it that make them tick. We see people as more than the sum of their parts.
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The Rise and Fall of the Wessely School
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Cohort Study Within UK Armed Forces Deployed to Iraq
Downloaded from bmj.com on 1 July 2008 Multiple vaccinations, health, and recall bias within UK armed forces deployed to Iraq: cohort study Dominic Murphy, Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely BMJ 2008;337;220- doi:10.1136/bmj.a220 Updated information and services can be found at: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/jun30_1/a220 These include: References This article cites 23 articles, 8 of which can be accessed free at: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/jun30_1/a220#BIBL Rapid responses You can respond to this article at: http://bmj.com/cgi/eletter-submit/337/jun30_1/a220 Email alerting Receive free email alerts when new articles cite this article - sign up in the service box at the top left of the article Topic collections Articles on similar topics can be found in the following collections Occupational Health (1301 articles) Anxiety disorders (including OCD and PTSD) (230 articles) Other Epidemiology (1717 articles) Chronic diseases (129 articles) Drugs: immunological products and vaccines (461 articles) Notes To order reprints follow the "Request Permissions" link in the navigation box To subscribe to BMJ go to: http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/subscribers Downloaded from bmj.com on 1 July 2008 RESEARCH Multiple vaccinations, health, and recall bias within UK armed forces deployed to Iraq: cohort study Dominic Murphy, research worker , Matthew Hotopf, professor of general hospital psychiatry, Simon Wessely, professor of epidemiology and liaison psychiatry King’s Centre for Military Health ABSTRACT and that recall bias was responsible for the results. ’ Research, King s College London Objective To assess the relation between self reported Retrospective recall of symptoms can be affected by SE5 9RJ number of vaccinations received and health, and between 12 Correspondence to: D Murphy recall bias.
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Read About the RSM's Response to COVID-19
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Simon Wessely FMHC
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Do Serving and Ex-Serving Personnel of the UK Armed Forces Seek Help for Perceived Stress, Emotional Or Mental Health Problems?
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Covid-19: Study to Assess Pandemic's Effects on Wellbeing of NHS Staff
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