Registration from 18.00-18.30 before a prompt start at 18.30.

Drinks and canapé reception for all from 19.45-21.00

Our everyday lives are increasingly intertwined with psychiatry and discussions of mental health. Yet the dominant medical discipline of psychiatry remains surrounded by controversy.

Professor Nikolas Rose’s new book, ‘Our Psychiatric Future’ (Polity, 2018), provides the starting point for a discussion between two thought-leaders, sharing their perspectives – from the social and the life sciences – on mental health and mental distress in contemporary societies.

In ‘Our Psychiatric Future’, Professor Rose dissects and challenges the part that psychiatry has come to play in the lives of many across the world, exploring wide-ranging questions including:

• Is there an ‘epidemic’ of mental ill health in contemporary societies?
• Is mental distress really an illness like any other, treatable by drugs?
• Can psychiatrists differentiate between mental disorders and normal eccentricities, anxieties or even sadness?
• Should the power of psychiatrists be challenged by the knowledge of those with lived experience of mental ill health?

This robust, critical discussion between two leading scholars will explore the present and future of mental health treatment and whether a ‘radically different psychiatry’ is possible.

About Nikolas Rose

Professor Nikolas Rose is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine (GHSM), King’s College London. Nikolas was Head of the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 2002-2006. He was founding Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology & Society from 2003-2012, when he left to establish the GHSM, then known as ‘Social Science, Health & Medicine’, at King’s.

For the past decade, Professor Rose’s research has focused on the conceptual, social and political dimensions of the contemporary life sciences and medicine. His current research concerns biological and genetic psychiatry and behavioural neuroscience.

Professor Rose is Chair of the Neuroscience and Society Network, a unique interdisciplinary collaboration of social scientists. He served as a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics for six years and has worked in various advisory capacities with pan-European networks and organisations including the Wellcome Trust, Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society.

‘Our Psychiatric Future’, his latest book, was published by Polity in October 2018.

About Simon Wessely

Professor Sir Simon Wessely is Regius Professor of Psychiatry in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) and Director of the Centre for Military Health Research at King’s College London.

Professor Wessely has been a consultant liaison psychiatrist at King’s College London and the Maudsley Hospital since 1991. He has a long-standing interest in the boundaries of medicine and psychiatry – particularly in unexplained symptoms and syndromes – and in military health.

Professor Wessely became Director of the Chronic Fatigue Research Unit at King’s in 1994 and of the Gulf War Illness Research Unit, now the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, in 1996. The centre, a collaboration between the IoPPN and the Department of War Studies at King’s, has had a direct impact on policy, treatment and help for personnel in the Armed Forces. Professor Wessley is Civilian Consultant Adviser in Psychiatry to the British Army and a trustee of ‘Combat Stress’, the principal UK charity for veterans with mental health problems.

Professor Wessely is a Foundation Senior Investigator of the National Institute for Health Research and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He served as the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists from 2014-17. Professor Wessely was awarded the first Nature ‘John Maddox Prize’ for ‘Standing up for Science’ in 2012 and was knighted in the New Year’s Honours List in 2013.