Tom Burns MD, CBE, DSc, FRCPsych

Dr. Tom Burns, MD, CBE, DSc, FRCPsych is a Professor of Community Psychiatry at St George's Medical School 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 rigor 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 we were convinced worked (very intensive follow-up and, more recently, compulsion outside the hospital) in fact do not make things any better for patients.

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 my wife Eva Burns-Lundgren, to Psychotherapy (2015).