Royal College of Psychiatrists' Winter Business Meeting

The Winter Business Meeting will be held on Friday 5 February 2010 at 12.00 at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and will be chaired by the President, Professor Dinesh Bhugra.

Agenda

1. 1. Approve the Minutes of the previous Winter Business Meeting held on 23 January 23 2009 at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

2. 2. Obituaries.

3. 3. Election of Honorary Fellows.

Nominations for Honorary Fellowship

The Rt Hon Lord Adebowale, CBE

Lord Adebowale has committed his working life to reform in public services in pursuit of reversing the inverse care law. Lord Adebowale has, with modesty, tact and courtesy, robustly lobbied, managed and fund raised in order to provide services for socially excluded, impoverished and disempowered groups with mental health problems. Lord Adebowale's work is and has been to provide comprehensive, safe and effective services for people with intellectual difficulties, homeless people, and people with drug and alcohol problems. As a Crossbench peer he is a regular contributor to debates in the House of Lords on these matters and on equalities issues.

Professor Germain Berrios, FRCPsych

Professor Berrios is a distinguished clinician, historian and epistemologist recently retired from the Chair of the Epistemology of Psychiatry in the University of Cambridge. This chair, the first in the world to carry such a name, was especially created to celebrate his contribution to psychiatry and concerns an inquiry into the origin, basis and legitimacy of psychiatric knowledge. Such knowledge, according to his conceptual model, issues out of a dialectical interaction between theoretical models and empirical research.

Professor Berrios’ research closely follows this model. His historical work started during the 1970s, developing new historiographical techniques in the field of psychiatry (conceptual history, model of convergence) and the introduction into the English language of clinical phenomena such as the Charles Bonnet syndrome (1981) and presbyophrenia (1985), and of meta-historical devices such as cognitive paradigma of dementia (1989). His empirical research into mental symptoms, both in the field of general psychiatry and in neuropsychiatry (which according to his strict definition is the psychiatry of neurological disease) led to his early publications (starting in the early 1980s) on the non-cognitive mental symptoms of dementia during a period when there was much resistance to acceptance of the reality of these clinical phenomena. A comparison between the presentation of mental symptoms in general psychiatry and in neurology also allowed the developments of concepts such as behavioural phenocopy and of a model of symptom-formation, which takes into account both the biological origins of the mental symptoms and the extensive formatting by means of cultural configurators.

All this work was undertaken by Professor Berrios while running a busy neuropsychiatric service at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge (for 31 years), and contributing to the institutions with which he became associated. He was Librarian of the College between 1985 and 1995 serving on Council, founder and first Chair of the History in Psychiatry group, and an Assistant Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Professor Berrios did not neglect his own locality and served for 15 years as College Tutor and then Course Organiser at Fulbourn Hospital. He was Chairman of the Research Ethics Committee of Cambridge University (one of the busiest in the country) for 20 years; in his Cambridge college (Robinson, where he has been awarded a Life Fellowship) he was Director of Medical Studies and Admissions Tutor in Medicine for 18 years; for the British Psychological Society (of which he has been Fellow for more than 20 years) he did confidential work evaluating the mental state of psychology colleagues. For 10 years he was also Chairman of the Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science, during which he presided over its metamorphosis from Syndicate to fully fledged Department.

At international level, Professor Berrios acted as Mental Health Consultant to the Spanish government; helped to organise the teaching of psychiatry in Hong Kong, and did World Health Organization consulting work in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru and several other countries.

This work notwithstanding, Professor Berrios remained busy teaching, researching and writing, with successive generations of students, and produced more than 400 publications - including more than 220 papers in refereed journals, 120 chapters in books, 14 books either single or multi-authored, and he remains the sole editor of History of Psychiatry (which he founded with his close friend Roy Porter in 1989), the leading journal in this field. In 1998, one of his books, The History of Descriptive Psychopathology, won the British Medical Journal Prize.

Professor Ian Gilmore

Professor Ian Gilmore is the President of the Royal College of Physicians. He is consultant physician and gastroenterologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospitals and Honorary Professor at the Department of Medicine, University of Liverpool. His specialty interest is liver disease.

The Royal College of Physicians has a long history of raising awareness of the health damage caused by addictive substances. The College was instrumental in establishing Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), and has used this as a model in developing the Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA). Professor Gilmore has been instrumental in establishing the AHA as an umbrella body to bring together a wide range of agencies in order to create a single strong voice on alcohol and health issues. The mission of the AHA is to reduce the damage to health caused by alcohol misuse.

Prior to the establishment of the AHA, Professor Gilmore's leadership on alcohol policy issues was outstanding as Chairman of the Royal College of Physicians’ Working Party Report, Alcohol: Can the NHS Afford It? A Blueprint for a Coherent Alcohol Strategy, in 2001. He was secretary of the Academy of Medical Sciences Working Party for the report Calling Time: The Nation's Drinking Habits as a Major Health Issue published in March 2004, and a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences Working Party which produced the report Brain Science, Addictions and Drugs published in May 2008.

He was a member of the External Advisory Board to the Cabinet Office National Harm Reduction Strategy in 2003, a member of the Department of Health's Alcohol Expert Clinicians Group, the steering group to establish the Drinkaware Trust, and a trustee of the Alcohol Research and Education Council. Professor Gilmore is also a member of the Secretary of State for Transport's Advisory Committee on Drugs and Alcohol, and of the Department of Children, Schools and Families Expert Panel on alcohol.

Internationally, Professor Gilmore is a member of the European Commission Alcohol and Health Forum, and Chair of the Science Group of this commission.

Professor Gilmore has been very supportive of our College's involvement in alcohol policy issues, including our call for more resources for specialist alcohol treatment services. He has taken the lead in influencing policy on alcohol marketing and minimum pricing for alcohol, as well as the reform of the Licensing Act 2003.

Professor Gilmore has a distinguished academic and clinical background. He is a physician of major international stature who has made very important contributions at national and European levels by his sustained and vigorous efforts to influence government policy on the management of alcohol policy and treatment. He can be singled out as an individual within the community of medical experts who has offered leadership on an issue which we as a College support fully.

Professor John Gunn, CBE, FRCPsych

Professor John Gunn has worked tirelessly to develop the academic foundation of forensic psychiatry in the UK, and continues to do so to consolidate training in the field internationally and establish better funding for research in the field. He was the first forensic psychiatrist to be made a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

He was appointed Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in 1978 and built a thriving and influential department. Many of the chairs and senior academic posts in the UK are held by people he trained. He has also led training to other disciplines and professions outside medicine, including the police, the probation service and the legal profession. A holder of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ bronze medal for research, and, much later, the Philippe Pinel award, he pioneered epidemiological studies in prisons in England and Wales, starting with a survey of epilepsy among prisoners and going on to be in the unique position of having conducted two national surveys of mental disorder among them more than 20 years apart. He has published a wealth of data-based papers, learned articles and books, and his work has been pivotal in securing major improvements in mental healthcare such as national change in provision for prisoners.

The most striking thing about his research is that he has practised what many merely preach - he has used his research to inform the development of essential and effective services, and ensured their evaluation and continuing improvement. Following his work on epilepsy, he founded a hostel and service for serious offenders with epilepsy or other brain injuries, enabling their safe rehabilitation into the community. This was a development that was welcomed even by the local community, which publicly honoured this work. He conducted the first evaluation of the only psychiatric prison in the country, and in so doing was able to draw attention to the effective use of the therapeutic community for serious offenders, which was then taken up in a number of other countries. As the director of the special hospitals research unit, he led much of the early research into outcome of for patients in high-security hospitals, nurturing the special hospitals’ case register and making it more effective and efficient in the process. Indirectly, this work ultimately led to reduction in occupancy of special hospital beds, with the development of the then less restrictive medium security hospital network. At first involved clinically with individual survivors of the P&O Channel ferry disaster, he recognised a broader need, researched this and set up the first traumatic stress clinic at the Maudsley Hospital, in order to be more prepared to assist after such disasters.

John Gunn's research initiatives, however, have not been confined to forensic psychiatry. One of his many roles for the Royal College of Psychiatrists was chairmanship of the then Research Committee, from which position he was one of those instrumental in setting up the College's Research Unit. He raised money for the first of the College's own studies - on the practice of electroconvulsive therapy nationally - and this has proved something of a template for much of the subsequent work of the unit, researching practice to improve it. He has been as committed to the vehicles of research and publication as to the research itself, and after years of selfless work for grant-giving bodies and journals he finally became one of the founder editors of Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.

His contributions to the public domain go well beyond research and service development, variously working for the Department of Health, the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence in a range of roles. For many years he was an advisor and trainer for the Metropolitan Police - a quiet and sustaining presence at the famous Iranian Embassy Siege, though not, it has to be said, one of those abseiling in among the flash-bangs at the end. He was a member of the longer and more considered deliberations on the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, and at various other times sat on the Council for Science and Society, the Advisory Council of the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge, and General Medical Council Committees.

He has been a friend, support and leader in various roles for the Royal College of Psychiatrists and its associated bodies, such as the then Joint Committee on Higher Psychiatric Training. Elected to Council several times, he also served on the Court of Electors as Deputy Chief Examiner and, most recently, as Chair of the Faculty of Forensic Psychiatry (2000-2004). It was during this last period that he was instrumental in setting up the College's service for psychiatrists under stress.

John has secured these wide-ranging achievements while, from time to time, leading clinical services and, above all, continuing to treat and supervise successfully the most challenging individuals who had previously suffered rejection from most other services. John's concern for individual safety and well-being has remained as strong as his consideration of the safety and well-being of the wider public. Relieved that the death penalty is not something that degrades us in Europe, he continues to support colleagues elsewhere with their struggles against it and to write learned articles on the problem.

Since he retired from the Institute of Psychiatry, he has become a co-founder of the Ghent Group, which has been established as a European think tank for training and practice in forensic psychiatry in the European Union.

Professor Robin Murray, FRCPsych

Professor Robin Murray stepped down as Chair of Psychiatry and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London in September 2009 after more than 35 years of continuous service at the University and the Maudsley Hospital. Robin Murray is one of Europe's best known and most distinguished academic psychiatrists, and it would be fitting to mark the occasion with the award of Honorary Fellowship of the College.

Professor Murray has excelled over a 40-year career in the fields of research into mental disorders, teaching and mentoring students and trainees from around the world, and in providing clinical care for patients with severe mental disorders in south London for a generation.

Professor Murray has written 24 books, and produced over 850 scientific papers, an extraordinary record of productivity. His contributions are across a range of conditions and disorders, but chiefly the most severe mental illnesses in general, and schizophrenia in particular.

Professor Murray's work has had a major impact in numerous areas. From the start he was an outstanding clinician and researcher, winning the Gaskell Medal and then the Gold Medal of the College for his research that first warned about the risks of analgesic dependence and kidney function, leading to significant changes in the prescribing and availability of these drugs. He then was the first to draw attention to the problems of doctors with alcohol dependency, and was instrumental in a change of attitude towards problem drinking in general, as punitive methods of dealing with sick doctors were gradually replaced with more therapeutic (and successful) approaches.

By the the 1980s, however, his main research interests turned to the problem of the severe mental illnesses, and schizophrenia in particular. In a series of studies, he and his colleagues showed beyond doubt the importance of genetic factors in the causes of schizophrenia, beginning a complete reappraisal of the causes of this terrible disease. He then led a long series of studies that showed how early-life environmental factors such as obstetric problems and maternal infection were implicated in schizophrenia. At the same time he was crucial in introducing new neuroimaging techniques into psychiatry as he and his group started to demonstrate brain abnormalities. Nowadays, the generally accepted model of schizophrenia is that it is a disorder of neurodevelopment, a view Professor Murray first propounded in the 1980s, in which there is an interaction between genes and environment which produces a phenotype which gradually unfolds during the first decades of life.

Professor Murray has also made major contributions to other aspects of schizophrenia. He has been concerned for many years about the high rates of schizophrenia in certain ethnic minorities, and started a long-term collaboration with the University of the West Indies. He showed that schizophrenia is much more common in African-Caribbeans in the UK than in the Caribbean, suggesting again that social/environmental factors must play a role. He has been at the forefront of research that has convincingly demonstrated the role that cannabis plays in mental disorder, and has perhaps been the leading UK expert whose work has triggered a major rethink about the harm posed by that drug. Professor Murray has worked for the past 20 years with ethnic minority communities, opinion leaders, church leaders and others on mental health issues in south London and beyond.

He has also been associated with a series of important large-scale clinical trials of new treatments in schizophrenia, and new services for those at the start of their illness, which have had major impacts on the delivery of services for people with the disorder.

Overall, and without doubt, Professor Murray is the leading schizophrenia researcher in Europe, and one of the most influential across the world, as reflected in the numerous awards and honours he has received.

Professor Murray was Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry between 1982 and 1989, and as such is widely credited with transforming the future of the institution. He reformed the admissions procedures, enabled the finances to be stabilised (having been on the verge of bankruptcy), and began a long-term programme of recruitment that by the 1990s had seen the Institute of Psychiatry move up to its current position as Europe's leading institute for research into mental disorders, and as second only to the far larger Harvard University internationally. From 1989, Professor Murray was Chair of Psychological Medicine at the medical school, and then Chair and Head of Department of the Department of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry.

He is a charimatic and inspiring teacher. He has been the undergraduate Professor of Psychiatry at what was first King's College School of Medicine, then Guys, King's and St Thomas's and now the medical school at King's College, London (the largest medical school in the UK). His lectures are renowned for their wit and wisdom - but perhaps his most important quality is his ability to inspire and support what are by now countless numbers of his trainees from the UK and the rest of the world. This includes successfully supervising 57 MDs or PhDs.

It is Professor Murray's support and inspiration, and the affection in which he is held, that perhaps sets him apart from any other teacher in this country and beyond. Most successful and growing departments in the UK are led by former Murray students - for example, Manchester, Cambridge, Sheffield and Cardiff - and in the rest of the world, Maastricht, Bordeaux, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo and Melbourne. This attests to Robin's unique talent for spotting and nurturing talent and his intellectual generosity in letting it flourish.