Professor John Read

Mental health services and research have been dominated for several decades by a simplistic, reductionistic focus
of biological phenomena, with minimal consideration of the social context within which genes and brains inevitably operate. This ‘medical model’ ideology, enthusiastically supported by the pharmaceutical industry, has been particularly powerful in the field of psychosis, where it has led to unjustified and damaging pessimism about recovery.

This lecture will summarise the evidence that mental health problems, including hearing voices and being paranoid, are often understandable reactions to live events, not symptoms of an imaginary ‘illness’.