Til Wykes


Dame Til Wykes is an English academic, author and editor.
Born as Hilary Margaret Wykes, she is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at King's College London, Director of the NIHR Clinical Research Network: Mental Health, and President and Secretary of Schizophrenia International Research Society.
She is known for her work on Cognitive Remediation Therapy at King's College.

Research

Her research is focused on rehabilitation and recovery for people with severe mental illness for many years both in the development of services and the development and evaluation of innovative psychological treatments. Her main current research themes concentrate on how to improve thinking difficulties so people can take advantage of opportunities for recovery and how to increase therapeutic activities in acute mental health services.

Other work

Wykes was the director of the National Institute for Health Research's Mental Health Research Network until April 2015 when she became the National Specialty lead for Mental Health. She mainly carries out research on developing psychological treatments for schizophrenia. She founded and was the first director of the Service User Research Enterprise which employs expert researchers who have experience of using mental health services. Wykes continues to be co-director with Professor Diana Rose, a senior service-user researcher. Since 2002, she has been the executive editor of the Journal of Mental Health. Recently she became a member of the scientific advisory board of Psyberguide

Awards

Wykes has received both the M.B. Shapiro Award and the May Davidson Award. The M.B. Shapiro Award is given to "a clinical psychologist who has achieved eminence in the profession" and the May Davidson award is given to "psychologist who has made an outstanding contribution to the development of clinical psychology within the first 10 years of their work". Wykes received the British Psychological Society's 2014 Award for Promoting Equality of Opportunity for "her part in championing the active role of mental health service users in research". Til Wykes and Hussain Manawer won a Guinness World Record for the largest mental health lesson, given on 21 March 2017 to 538 students at the Hackney Empire. Professor Til Wykes was selected by the members of the jury as the winner of the EPA Constance Pascal – Helen Boyle Prize for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in Working to Improve Mental Health Care in Europe for 2020.

Selected papers