Simon Wessely - Regius Professor of Psychiatry

Welcome to my home page. My name is Simon Wessely and I am a clinical academic at King’s College London. I am the Professor of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience which is a School within King’s. I am a Consultant Psychiatrist at King’s College Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital, all of which are part of our Academic Health Sciences Centre, and where I practice what is known as liaison psychiatry, which is all about the boundaries and overlaps between physical and mental health.  Finally, I am a former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the current President of Royal Society of Medicine.

I started my career studying unexplained symptoms and syndromes, and continue to see sufferers from chronic fatigue syndrome in our clinical service. However, these days, my main research interests these days lie in military health and how people and populations react to adversity I am also very involved in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education.  Of course, as President of our Royal College I have a wide range of responsibilities and interests, but if pushed I would say that my priorities are anything related to education, training and recruitment in mental health in general and psychiatry in particular;  recognizing the inseparability of physical and mental health, and promoting public engagement activities to overcome stigma and mythology around around psychiatry and mental health   In a world given to sound bites, mine would be to ensure that psychiatry is visible, credible and useful.

I have to admit that it has taken me rather a long time to decide to join all my fellow academics who have similar pages. I am not, as my family will confirm, a great one for the internet age – I only recently joined twitter as @wesselyS under pressure from my wife. But I think it is worthwhile putting together what it is that I do and have done, if only to make life easier for the next person who has the task of introducing me at a meeting.

So, within this website you will find some biographical details, a list of all my publications with a good selection of PDFs or links to the full publications for those interested, some journalism either by or about me, one or two essays as well as my own blogs as President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and now Royal Society of Medicine (and I promise these are not in corporate style or format).