Primary Job Title President Primary Organization 
The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Location London, England, United Kingdom Regions Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Gender Male
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Simon Wessely is Professor and Head of the Department of Psychological Medicine and Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), King’s College London. He is a clinical liaison psychiatrist, with a particular interest in unexplained symptoms and syndromes. As Vice Dean he has overall responsibility for undergraduate and
postgraduate psychiatry training, and is particularly committed to sharing his enthusiasm for clinical psychiatry with medical students. He also remains research active, continuing to publish on many areas of psychiatry, psychological treatments, epidemiology and military health.
Born and educated in Sheffield, he studied medical sciences and history of art at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then finished his medical training at University College Oxford, graduating in 1981. He obtained his medical membership in Newcastle, before moving to London’s Maudsley Hospital to train in psychiatry, where he also obtained a Master’s and Doctorate in epidemiology. His doctoral thesis was on crime and schizophrenia. Professor Wessely has been a consultant liaison psychiatrist at King’s College Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital since 1991, where he set up the first NHS service for sufferers from chronic fatigue syndrome.
