Wow, quite a vigorous response. To those who have given useful information, many thanks, and I'll have a proper look in the next couple of days when I'm a bit less busy with writing, but in the meantime a few points to clarify.
1. I'm not fishing for an article, just generally curious. I'm a curious person, I like to explore a range of topics, eventually some of them might become articles, but in the meantime I keep an open mind.
2. A couple of you I think are really getting a bit carried away, and I mean that with the greatest possible respect. For example, Knackered, you cited my Twitter feed. All I did was ask someone to send me a copy of one of Wessely's papers - I don't understand why you think that somehow tells you what I think about your condition? Also, the fact that myself, Crippen and Goldacre all write for the Guardian doesn't mean we have the same views or are part of some cabal - we're all freelance for a start, and The Guardian has many differing views on topics.
3. Regarding Proctor, as it stands I think the official story carries more weight, but I'm happy to be shown evidence otherwise. I think it might be helpful for some of you to see this from a journalist's point of view. Witness testimony is unreliable, period. The testimony of victims especially so, and the testimony of child victims notoriously so. I don't regard Ean's own testimony as particularly reliable because he was a young child who was - whichever version of events you believe - a victim of child abuse (either by his parents or by carers). That's absolutely not to call him a liar, but the mind plays many tricks in these cases. Elements of the testimony on video also don't particularly match how they've been presented on some websites.. for example, Ean's description of the swimming pool incident sounds very dramatic, but when you listen to it isn't clearly a description of any abuse.
Leaving that aside, we have two versions of events. The official version can be backed up by considerable testimony from I believe at least three different hospitals, half a dozen different institutions, and several experts. It's possible testimony there might be wrong, but as the number of independent sources rises, the probability decreases dramatically. For the official story to be wrong, it seems to be that many people would have to be involved in quite a far-reaching conspiracy.
On the other hand, the version of events you support here seems less well-backed up, and doesn't explain a lot of things - for example, his previous hospitalizations. There's also the problem that even if I were to accept everything you've said as true, it still doesn't lead to Wessely being culpable for things like the swimming pool incident - those would have been down to Proctor's carers.
So on the balance of evidence, at the moment I have to swing towards to official story, but I'm not close-minded to new evidence if any exists - it'd be a big story after all. I also have to say that when I read Wessely's writing, he comes across as sympathetic, if at times blunt, but then he's generally writing for a scientific audience, not for patients or lay-people, and I'm used to that sort of language and writing style. I can see how some of what he says out of the context of a scientific paper might be seen as unsympathetic, or patronizing.
4. My views on CFS/MRE - genuinely undecided, as you'll have seen if you look through the BS forum. There seem to be problems isolating a coherent set of symptoms to agree on. I suspect that as with virtually all illnesses there is some psychological component, but to what extent who knows. There does seem to be a very strong opposition to psychology here, which I'm curious to understand more - it almost seems to me at times that some of you object to a psychological cause because you feel that people are saying it's not 'real' in some way?
What would be interesting would be to canvas some of your views... what do you think should be happening with research in this area, where do you think the current problems are institutionally (government, academia, NGOs?), what do you think is the most promising research at the moment, and so on.
So anyway, hopefully that gives you all some food for thought. One piece of advice - some of the bad science regulars haven't been that polite, which is a shame. Most of you have welcomed me here, even if I may not always agree with you - and for that thanks. But a couple of people here seem quite unpleasant/hostile, like the guy misrepresenting my Twitter feed - I don't think there's any need for that, and I'm just going to skip over stuff like that in future as I don't think it's helpful for discussion.
