If you feel that Wessely is again being honoured for something he should not; then I am hardly in a position to dissuade you.
However, the arguments I have read that attempt to convey this are not convincing. Not to me anyway.
I dare say it's because you haven't read much of Wessely's research. Over the past week, I have.
He starts with the premise that CFS is just a point on the spectrum of fatigue. To him, CFS
is Fatigue. Okay, fine - he can have his opinion.
Then he conducts studies on fatigued patients with somatic symptoms. Most of these studies involve the use of psychiatric questionnaires. Some of these questionnaires (such as the General Health Questionnaire) will interpret the symptoms of any systemic illness as indicating definite psychiatric illness. Wessely also shows a tendency to select non-somatization questionnaires where questions aimed at depression or anxiety are phrased in a manner that will come up positive for someone with significant physical or cognitive limitations. Then, based on the overlap of physical symptoms in both CFS and these questionnaires, he concludes that the vast majority of CFS patients have psychiatric disorder.
These psychiatric findings pair up nicely with his belief that CFS = fatigue. Additional symptoms can easily be blamed on psychiatric disorders, hence him waffling on repeatedly about outcome being worse with more severe psychiatric disorder/more symptoms. This allows him the much-used "out" of blaming the patient's beliefs about symptom causation for poor prognosis.
In psychiatric research with controls, the controls are typically poorly matched - people with illnesses that are not systemic, such as muscular disorder or broken limbs, or even healthy controls. Naturally those controls will have fewer physical symptoms and score mentally healthier on the carefully selected questionnaires.
Conversely, in physical studies he will sometimes exclude anyone with psychiatric disorder. Depending on the questionnaires or other criteria used to determine psychiatric disorder, this could have the effect of excluding CFS patients with much of anything other than fatigue.
In biological, but not psychiatric, research involving Wessely, there is always a disclaimer to the effect that all relevant physical findings are controversial and contradictory. When abnormalities are found, there is usually an attribution to psychiatric causation (based on the psychiatric questionnaires). On the rare occasion that there is not a psychiatric attribution, Wessely is usually far down on the list of authors, and he tends to ignore those papers in his future research - somewhat remarkable considering how extensively he cites to himself.
Then we get to treatment, which is aimed at changing the beliefs that are presumed to perpetuate symptoms. Wessely's vague grasp of ethics says it's wrong to lie outright to patients, but it's strongly recommended to fundamentally mislead them for the purpose of maintaining the doctor-patient relationship. He acknowledges that if most of us knew what the biopsychosocial school thought about our symptoms, we would walk out, and seek out doctors that will tell us what we want to hear (and condemn us to an eternity of illness in the process).
If you aren't willing to read his papers (it does impart a rather remarkable feeling of filth), the highlights are at
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/simon-wessely-quotes.21025/#post-319726 . Links to sources, mostly at his own website, are included, in case anyone is skeptical about issues regarding context and such.