Professor Simon Wessely MA, BM BCh, MSc, MD, FRCP, FRCPsych, F Med Sci.

Simon Wessely is Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry, and Chair and Head of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. He is Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at King’s and Maudsley Hospitals. He is Honorary Consultant Advisor in Psychiatry to the British Army and one of the new Foundation Senior Investigators of the National Institute of Health Research.

He started at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and read Art for his Part 2, developing an abiding love for Vassily Kandinsky and equal dislike of the work of Marc Chagall. He qualified in medicine at University College Oxford, followed by two years in Newcastle being a real doctor and getting medical membership. However, he always intended to study psychiatry, and started training at the Maudsley in 1984, and has not really left Camberwell since, other than a year at the National Hospital for Neurology, and a year studying epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene.

Professor Wessely is Director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, a collaboration between psychiatry, medicine, history and war studies, at King’s College London (www.kcl.ac.uk/kcmhr), and of the Academic Centre for Defence Mental Health (ACDMH), a partnership between MoD and King’s College London. He is a member of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council.

His research interests are in the grey areas between medicine and psychiatry, clinical epidemiology, psychiatric injury and military health. His first paper was called “Dementia and Mrs Thatcher”, but since then he has published over 600 papers on many subjects, including epidemiology, post traumatic stress, psychological debriefing, chronic fatigue syndrome, history, chronic pain, suicide, somatisation, Gulf War illness, shell shock, military health, terrorism and population resilience.  He is also keen on public engagement activities around psychiatry, medicine and science, although according to Who’s Who his favourite activity remains “arguing in cafes”.

Professor Wessely has recently co-authored books on chronic fatigue syndrome, the randomised controlled trial in psychiatry, and a new history of shell shock – but none has yet reached the best-seller lists. He is more proud of the fact that, contrary to the expectations of his friends and family, he has now completed the Pedal to Paris to raise money for the Royal British Legion for the sixth time, although Paris gets further away each year.