Damehood for Professor Til Wykes

We are delighted to announce that Professor Til Wykes, Vice-Dean of Psychology and Systems Science and Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London, has been awarded a damehood for services to Clinical Psychology, in the New Year Honours List 2016.

Professor Dame Til Wykes has been an international leader in understanding and advancing the rehabilitation and recovery for people with severe mental illness. She founded, and is Co-Director of, the King’s Service User Research Enterprise (SURE), which is the first unit in the UK to focus on including the service user perspective by employing people who have experience of using mental health services. She was the founding director of the Mental Health Research Network, which delivered a dramatic increase in opportunities for service users to participate in mental health research.

Professor Dame Til Wykes said: ‘I am really proud of my work in supporting people who have experienced mental health problems to be involved in designing and carrying out mental health research and delighted this has been recognised.  My research would have been much less interesting without their thought provoking questions.’

Dame Til has degrees in Psychology and Clinical Psychology from Nottingham, Sussex and London universities and is a practising clinical psychologist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, working mostly with people with psychosis. The main focus of her clinical research is the development of better treatments for people with schizophrenia but her investigations stretch across all mental health conditions.

She concentrates on discovering new psychological mechanisms and uses them to develop better treatments, following this up with studies showing how to implement them in the day-to-day work of the NHS. Among treatments developed are those for hearing voices; for thinking problems; and for bolstering self-esteem. She is currently leading a major national project supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) that will investigate the best way to provide computerised thinking skills treatment (cognitive remediation) to young people with a first episode of psychosis.

Amongst her other work, Dame Til was instrumental in setting up the BRC/U Service User Advisory Group (SUAG), which forms part of our patient and carer involvement theme, but provides vital  feedback and criticism for the work of the whole BRC/U.

Charles Sharp noted Dame Til’s achievements in a letter to the Guardian.  Other awards given for services to mental health included CBEs awarded to Paul Farmer, Chief Executive of Mind, and to Dr Geraldine Mary Strathdee, National clinical director for mental health, NHS England. 

Read Dame Til’s note of thanks to all her collaborators on her LinkedIn page.


Tags: Staff News - Patient and Carer Involvement and Engagement -

By NIHR Maudsley BRC at 30 Dec 2015, 16:20 PM


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