Graham Thornicroft


Sir Graham Thornicroft is a British psychiatrist, researcher and professor of community psychiatry at the Centre for Global Mental Health and Centre for Implementation Science at King's College London. He is best known for his work on community mental health services, stigma and discrimination, and global mental health. He has published 30 books, and has written over 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Thornicroft was made a knight bachelor in the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to mental health.

Education and Early Life

Thornicroft gained a degree in Social and Political Sciences from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. After a year working as a residential social worker in a children’s home in Labrador, Canada, he studied Medicine at Guy’s Hospital, and trained in psychiatry at both the Maudsley and Johns Hopkins Hospitals. He completed an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and went on to complete his PhD at the University of London, focusing on the positive outcomes of discharging long-term psychiatric in-patients to community care.
In November 2019, Thornicroft was interviewed on the BBC World Service series, The Inquiry, in a radio documentary called "What can we do about the world's mental health problem?", in which he revealed that he had been inspired to become a psychiatrist by an incident in his childhood when his mother, suffering from depression, had attempted to kill herself and her children by using the gas from the kitchen oven. Thornicroft's mother was medically treated for a year and then returned to work.

Career

Thornicroft is a consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He is the founding Head of the Health Service and Population Research Department at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at KCL, Founding Director of King's Improvement Science and as Director of the NIHR CLAHRC South London, he created the Centre for Implementation Science
Thornicroft is a founding member of the Movement for Global Mental Health, a network of 200 institutions and 10,000 individuals involved in improving services for people living with mental health problems and psycho-social disabilities. Alongside Professor Norman Sartorius, Thornicroft is also the Co-Founder of the INDIGO Network, an international collaboration of researchers working to assess the global impact of discrimination against people with mental illness. He is the Director of the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in South London and Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health at KCL.

Mental health policy

Thornicroft co-Chaired the External Reference Group to create the National Service Framework for Mental Health in England, the national mental health plan for the country. Published in 1999, it is a 10-year policy framework with an associated implementation plan that transformed the provision of mental health care in England.

Stigma and discrimination research

In 2006, Thornicroft published Shunned: Discrimination against People with Mental Illness and the book won the British Medical Association Award for Best Mental Health Book of the Year. He established the INDIGO Network, a research collaboration in over 40 countries developing evidence about reducing mental illness related stigma and discrimination. In collaboration with colleagues he has published over 140 scientific papers on stigma and discrimination, including papers from the evaluation of Time to Change, the national programme to reduce stigma and discrimination in England.

Global mental health

Thornicroft co-Chaired the World Health Organisation Mental Health Global Action Plan Guidelines Development Group with Shekhar Saxena. As a result, in 2010 the WHO launched its mhGAP Intervention Guide, which has since been implemented in over 100 countries. In 2014, Thornicroft and Nicole Votruba coordinated the FundaMentalSDG initiative that contributed to the adoption of mental health related targets and indicators within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Thornicroft is a member of an international group of experts which produced the 2007 Lancet Global Mental Health series aiming to "highlight the gaps in mental-health services worldwide, and to formulate a clear call to action". A decade later, in 2018, the work on "transforming the way policy makers thought about global health" culminated in the publishing of the second part of the series: The Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development. Thornicroft was a Principal Investigator of the Community Psycho Social Intervention study in India, a Welcome Trust randomized controlled trial of community mental health teams in Chennai, Goa and Maharashtra. He has also led the Emerald Programme, funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. In 2017, the project was presented in the House of Commons in London.

Awards

Thornicroft has received more than 150 research funding awards, to a total value of over £100 million. In collaboration with the WHO, Thornicroft developed the HESPER needs assessment scale for use in humanitarian disaster and emergency situations, piloted in Jordan, Gaza, Haiti, Nepal, Sudan and Uganda. This work led the Health Service and Population Research Department at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at KCL to win the 2009 Queen’s Award Prize for Further and Higher Education for work of outstanding excellence.

Books