Graham Thornicroft is Professor of Community Psychiatry at the Centre for Global Mental Health and the Centre for Implementation Science, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He is also a Consultant Psychiatrist at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, working in a community mental health team in Lambeth. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, is a National Institute of Health Research Senior Investigator Emeritus and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Honorary Fellow of King’s College London and the Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Graham took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge in Social and Political Sciences, studied Medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London and then trained in Psychiatry at the Maudsley and Johns Hopkins Hospitals. He gained an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a PhD at the University of London.
Graham has made significant contributions to the development of mental health policy in England, including chairing the External Reference Group for the National Service Framework for Mental Health, the national mental health plan for England for 1999-2009.
He is also active in global mental health, for example, he chaired the World Health Organisation Guideline Development Group for the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) Intervention Guide (1st and 2nd editions), a practical support for primary care staff to treat people with mental, neurological and substance use disorders in low and lower middle incomes, which is now used in over 100 countries worldwide. He chaired the External Reference Group for the WHO guidelines on the Management of Physical Health Conditions in adults with severe mental disorders (2018). He now chairs the Guideline Development Group for the WHO guidelines on mental health at work.
He is a Board Trustee of United for Global Mental Health, a Board Member for Mental Health and Human Rights, and he chairs the Board of Implemental. His areas of research expertise include: reduction of stigma and discrimination, evaluation of mental health services, and global mental health. Graham has written over 630 peer-reviewed papers in PubMed, and authored or edited over 32 books of which 7 are award winning. In 2020 and 2021 he was named as among the most Highly Cited Researchers in the world by Clarivate. Graham has appeared in the media including BBC 1, BBC World Service, BBC Today radio programme, and The Economist. Graham received a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours Awards in 2017.