WHO I AM

I live in the lively city of Brighton on the south coast of England, just a 50-minute train journey from London. I live alone since my dear wife Judith died in 2023 but I have two sons and a daughter and grandson living locally and another son not far away who I am in close contact with, and good neighbours. I retain my connection with Birmingham University where I am fortunate enough to have an honorary position as Emeritus Professor of Clinical and Community Psychology in the School of Psychology. I am altogether very privileged.

MY BACKGROUND

Trained as a clinical psychologist, my work took me from south London in the 1960s and 70s, to Exeter in the 70s, 80s and early 90s, and then to Birmingham. I have worked in the NHS, Universities, and sometimes in both. The larger parts of my work have been in research and postgraduate teaching. I headed clinical psychology training for over 20 years, at Exeter and then Birmingham, and have taught other health professions and undergraduate psychologists.

For most of my career my principal area of interest was addiction, how it might be understood and treated, and how family and others are impacted by it and how those affected-others might be supportive and be helped themselves. From the 1970s onwards, I was active as a member of various national working parties on alcohol services and research for, amongst others, the Royal College of General Practitioners in the mid-1980s; and in the charity sector, for example as a Trustee of Aquarius Action Projects from 2000 to 2014. I was a founding member of the Addiction and the Family International Network (AFINet) which now has over 500 members in over 50 countries. My work in addiction and the family has taken me to a number of countries, most memorably to Mexico, where I was Visiting Senior Researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, and to the Northern Territory in Australia. I am currently a Visiting Professor of Gambling Studies at King’s College, London. In 2010 I was awarded the internationally prestigious Jellinek Memorial Award for work on alcohol and other addictions.

Perhaps partly because of my background in addiction, over the years I have increasingly adopted a social/community orientation to psychology, and have sought to introduce the ideas of community psychology in the UK. As well as attempting to do this through my teaching, I wrote what were at the time the only existing British textbooks of community psychology and was a co-founding editor of the only European journal of community psychology, The Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology. I was also a co-founder of the British Psychological Society’s Community Psychology Section and of the European Community Psychology Association. I taught on the Masters in Community Psychology at the Institute of Advanced Applied Psychology in Lisbon, Portugal for several years in the 2000s.