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Prof Tom Burns CBE

Emerita/Emeritus Fellow, Fellow

Professor of Social Psychiatry

MD (Cambridge); MA (Oxford); DSc (London); FRC Psych

Tom has recently retired from the post of Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford which he held from 2003 to 2014. Before that he was Professor of Community Psychiatry at St George’s London.  His research has mainly been into the forms of care for individuals with severe mental illnesses (essentially psychoses) away from hospitals. He focused on trying to improve the rigour of such research and on trying to identify the different components of their care, separating what works from what does not. A couple of his trials have unexpectedly shown that things researchers were convinced worked (very intensive follow up and, more recently, compulsion outside hospital) in fact do not make things any better for patients. Such findings do not make you popular. The response to these two trials has dispelled any illusions he may have harboured that scientists were cool, dispassionate and rational beings.

He is of the generation of psychiatrists who were most interested in psychological factors and psychotherapy and not just brain chemicals and drugs. Constantly irritated by the endless misrepresentation of psychiatry in public media, he has been concerned to try and make his profession more intelligible to the general public. In addition to his academic publications, he has published a Penguin describing psychiatry and exploring its controversies (Our Necessary Shadow: the Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry, Penguin 2013) and two OUP Very Short Introductions, one to Psychiatry (2006) and one, along with his wife Eva Burns-Lundgren, to Psychotherapy (2015).