Professor John Wing, CBE

Formerly Professor of Social Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, London

John Wing was born on 22 October 1923. He joined the Fleet Air Arm at the height of the Second World War, and found himself navigating planes engaged in bombing raids over Scandinavia. It was often necessary to land on the mother ship mid-ocean and John possessed the courage and skill to bring this dangerous operation to a successful conclusion.

After the war, he trained at University College London, where he met his future wife, Lorna. After completion of his training, John immersed himself in the problems of rehabilitating people with schizophrenia, who were languishing in mental hospitals. In 1960 he produced his PhD thesis and a year later his MD thesis. During this time his collaboration with George Brown produced the seminal book Institutionalism and Schizophrenia, which gave the world its most definitive description of social factors that favoured the production of negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and those associated with the reverse.

John was a man with a soft heart and a steely determination. He studied and sympathised with people of all sorts and ages in the course of improving the lots of both patients and their families who were receiving inadequate treatment. At parties in his home, catered by Lorna, he would arrange table tennis tournaments, and if pressed, would, with some diffidence, take up his guitar and play.

He was keen to adopt technical advances and in the precomputer era would bring a hand-held mechanical calculator to meetings and perform instant calculations by cranking the handle. In meetings he was not voluble but when necessary would apply his keen intelligence to problems and cut through the waffle. John's intellectual acuity is remembered from seminars he gave in the early 1970s at the Institute of Psychiatry. For instance, he would terrify the assembled Maudsley registrars by asking if anyone would defend the medical model. No one would offer, and he would lay out his views on the nature of psychiatric disorders, of psychiatric classification, and of diagnosis. In doing so he revealed his debt to Karl Popper, and the way he had adapted Popper's thinking to the needs of psychiatric research. His central role in the development of the Present State Examination was driven by these ideas.

As Director of the Medical Research Council's Social Psychiatry Research Unit, he oversaw the production of numerous measuring instruments without which much social research across the world could not have been done, and he produced the influential epidemiological study of mental disorders in Camberwell, as well as overseeing the Maudsley Hospital's first steps to establishing a community mental health service. He was appointed as the first director of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Research Unit on his retirement in 1989. Over the next 7 years, he laid the foundations for a thriving work programme that continues to this day and which has had a substantial influence on national policy and on improving the quality of mental healthcare in the UK. He was elected to the Honorary Fellowship of the College in 1996.

In 1994, he finished work commissioned by the Department of Health to develop the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales (HoNOS). The Scales are probably now the most widely used system for monitoring the outcomes for people with severe mental illness. They have been translated into many languages and a number of countries have mandated their use as part of monitoring of routine care.

John led the development of the College's first clinical practice guideline using state-of-the-art methods for review and grading of the evidence. The guideline on the management of violence in mental healthcare settings was published 2 years before the establishment of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and placed the College in a strong position to host the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, which continues to produce clinical practice guidelines that are considered the world's best.

John loved gardening. In Sussex he had 2–3 acres of garden, which he completely redesigned, making flowerbeds and paths between them, and planting some beautiful trees, bushes and flowers. He planned it all without any help and the result was a tribute to his artistic eye.

John had a cat, who was a mighty hunter and was especially attached to him. The cat used to place all the trophies he brought in through the cat flap (mice, rats, even the occasional rabbit) underneath John's chair at the dining table. In this, the cat resembled his former junior colleagues, one of whom writes: ‘As a naturally quiet man, the most salient way in which John transmitted his intellectual legacy was by commenting on draft papers. One's best efforts would come back with annotations and corrections that would provide sudden insights and a requirement to reconsider the architecture of one's own thinking’.

Professor John Wing died on 18 April 2010.