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Andrew McWilliams

Clinical Research Fellow

  • PhD student in the Mental Health and Justice Project

Biography

Andrew is a specialist registrar in child and adolescent psychiatry, currently working as a full-time researcher on the Mental Health and Justice Project. This inter-institutional and cross-disciplinary project investigates questions about supported decision-making and how we assess people’s capacity to make decisions for themselves.

Andrew's research focuses on the interface between decision-making capacity and metacognition (“thinking about your own thinking”), working with Dr Stephen Fleming and Prof Anthony David at UCL. He is interested in how metacognition changes through life and with illness, and how this might relate to the ability to take an authentic decision. They have developed a gamified computer task to measure metacognition, which they are now using in large-scale web-based studies and with clinical populations, including Parkinson’s disease, dementia and functional neurological illness. They also study real-world practices of assessment, including in health and social care settings, and the use of psychological and neuroscientific evidence in the Court of Protection.

After undergraduate study at Cambridge University in Natural Sciences, Andrew studied medicine at Barts and the London, winning the Strauss Prize in Psychological Medicine. He began training in psychiatry training on the Maudsley Programme as the first academic clinical fellow in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and is now a higher trainee at Great Ormond Street/Royal London Hospitals. Andrew attends the Tourette Syndrome Clinic at Great Ormond Street Hospital with Prof Isobel Heyman, where he has a research interest in functional illness in the paediatric age range. In 2019 he was awarded an Annual Meeting Senior Researcher Award by the American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Andrew also have a longstanding interest in the arts and believe in the potential for their use in mental illness.

    Research

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    Mental Health, Ethics & Law Research Group

    The group is concerned with problems which psychiatry, ethics and law have in common and with devising interdisciplinary strategies to research them.

      Research

      brain spotlight hero
      Mental Health, Ethics & Law Research Group

      The group is concerned with problems which psychiatry, ethics and law have in common and with devising interdisciplinary strategies to research them.