Professor Sir Simon Wessely

Simon Wesley, it's still, I assume, much too soon to really assess what the impact of COVID-19 will be on the population's mental health, but the early signs aren't looking good by any measure. Why is the virus taking such a toll on our emotional well being, do you think?

All crises create fear and COVID creates fear for all the obvious reasons. But we get by our fear through our social relationships with people. But Covid creates the fear and the threat, but then our reactions to it and how we have to manage it destroy the very things that get us through difficult times at the time when we need them most. And that's why social distancing is such a toxic thing for mental health.

Simon, when you were starting out, a treatment called psychological debriefing was often used to help people who had just experienced a traumatic event, and that meant that counsellors were sometimes on the scene of those events, sent to offer immediate support. But over the years, studies went on to show that that kind of early intervention can actually be harmful. Why?

We have defense mechanisms for a reason, and that soon after a terrible event, you know, the best things to do is to think about how you're going to get home, where's the family, how can I communicate with them? Incredibly important, but not dwell on some of the horrible things that you've seen. It's too early. It also sends out a message to people that you've got a professional problem that needs professional help. And it's part of the kind of medicalization of ordinary life that has happened in the last 20 years. And that's not actually helpful to you. You will get better, and you will largely get better through guess what? Talking to your friends, family, colleagues, GP, your vicar, whatever. And people like me should only come in if you're still feeling that way, maybe six, ten, twelve weeks later.

So you were an only child. When you were growing up, how much did your father share with you about his past?

I can't say it was the dominant feature of my childhood. The main thing I remember was I wasn't allowed to go to Spain on holiday with some friends, and I got very upset and said, Why? And they said, Well, because it's run by a fascist, and fascists are very bad people, and we don't go to Spain. Now, remember, my father was a child refugee, he's not a Holocaust survivor. The most disturbing thing that happened to him during those years was actually when he was in the Navy when he was sunk twice, and the second time was very dreadful. And he lost all his hair, though the ship had overturned, and he was rescued 24 hours later. And he had nightmares about that for the rest of his life. I mean, he wasn't ill in any way, didn't need any help and didn't have PTSD, but he had a bad war and had nightmares about it.

You went on to complete your clinical studies at Oxford. At what point and why were you drawn to psychiatry?

At medical school, the thing that turned me on, started this possibility, was actually Anthony Clare, the great psychiatrist of that period, indeed of any period. And he wrote a book called Psychiatry and Dissent that came out when I was at medical school. And I found it really exciting that here was a discipline that was not afraid to challenge itself. It was all about the arguments, and there are always arguments in psychiatry. We love an argument. And also, that they were really accessible to other people. So he was talking about when does sadness become depression? And how do we classify mental disorders? Should we classify them at all? And then I liked the consultants, one, because they knew the names of all their patients, which wasn't common always. And second, was because they would ask me a question, and bizarrely, they were actually interested in my answer. Whereas in the rest of medicine, they would ask you what are the nine causes of jaundice to show that you're an ignorant medical student because you only remembered eight. And I like that.