Biography

Graham Thornicroft is Professor of Community Psychiatry at the Centre for Global Mental Health, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He also works as a Consultant Psychiatrist at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in a local community mental health team in Lambeth. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, is a National Institute of Health Research Senior Investigator Emeritus and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, King’s College London and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for research and teaching at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.

Graham took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge in Social and Political Sciences, studied Medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London and then trained in Psychiatry at the Maudsley and Johns Hopkins Hospitals. He gained an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a PhD at the University of London.

Graham has made significant contributions to the development of mental health policy in England, including Chairing the External Reference Group for the National Service Framework for Mental Health, the national mental health plan for England for 1999-2009.

He is also active in global mental health, for example, he co-chaired the World Health Organisation Guideline Development Group for the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) Intervention Guide (1st and 2nd editions), a practical support for primary care staff to treat people with mental, neurological and substance use disorders in low and lower middle incomes, which is now used in over 100 countries worldwide. He also chaired the External Reference Group for the WHO guidelines on the Management of Physical Health Conditions in adults with severe mental disorders (2018).

He is a Board Trustee of United for Global Mental Health and he chairs the Boards of Implemental, and the Federation: Global Initiative in Psychiatry. His areas of research expertise include: stigma and discrimination, evaluations of mental health treatments, services and systems, implementation science, and global mental health. Graham has authored or edited over 30 books and over 570 peer-reviewed papers in Pubmed. Graham received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours Awards in 2017.