Institute of Psychiatry

The Institute of Psychiatry is one of the world's largest postgraduate teaching
and research centres in the sciences relevant to mental health. Its work encompasses
almost the entire range of disciplines required to understand the causes of
mental disorders, to develop new treatments, and to evaluate their implementation
at a patient level, as well as at the level of services and national health
and social care policies. Research and teaching cover the broadest spectrum
- from molecular genetics and biology, through, neuroscience, neuroimaging,
clinical research studies, psychological studies, new treatments, longitudinal
studies, clinical trials, biostatistics, epidemiology, health services research,
to transcultural studies.

History

The Institute of Psychiatry, which became a school of King%27s College London in 1997, is closely linked with the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, including the famous Bethlem Royal Hospital. Bethlem was founded in 1247 by Simon Fitzmary as a priory dedicated to St Mary of Bethlehem. Its site in Bishopsgate in the City of London now lies under Liverpool Street Station. The first definite evidence of its use to house mentally ill patients dates from 1403, making Bethlem probably the oldest mental hospital in the world. In 1676, Bethlem moved to a grand and famous building in Moorfields designed by Robert Hooke. The term 'Bedlam’, derived from the Hospital’s name and used to indicate a scene of turmoil or confusion, reflects the way in which Bethlem was open to the public, and it became notorious for the sightseers who thronged its galleries until indiscriminate public visiting was ended in 1770. In 1815, the hospital moved to St George’s Fields, Southwark, and some of its former buildings are now occupied by the Imperial War Museum. In 1930, the hospital relocated again to Monks Orchard, Beckenham, south of London. Bethlem’s medical school was recognised as a school of the University of London in 1924 but lost this status in 1946. Two years later, Bethlem was united with the Maudsley in the same year that the Maudsley’s medical school gained independent status as the Institute of Psychiatry. Since 1999, both hospitals have been part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM). The Maudsley Hospital was opened in 1923 as a London County Council (LCC) hospital devoted to the early treatment of acute mental illness. It was founded at the initiative of Dr Henry Maudsley, an eminent psychiatrist who gave Ł30,000 to the LCC, covering half the cost of building the hospital. He and Sir Frederick Mott, the pathologist of the LCC asylums, laid down strict conditions. The hospital was to be small; to be for early and acute cases only; to have research facilities; to become a medical school of the University of London; and to be in a central position within three to four miles of Trafalgar Square. Intentionally as unlike as possible to the Victorian asylums, the Maudsley was modelled on German university psychiatric clinics. After serving as a military hospital treating shell-shock cases during the 1914-18 war, the Maudsley finally opened under LCC control in 1923 and rapidly gained an international reputation for teaching and research. The first medical superintendent of the Maudsley Hospital from 1923 until 1939 was Dr Edward Mapother.

In 1948, the Maudsley’s medical school was renamed the Institute of Psychiatry and, under the directorship of Professor (later Sir) Aubrey Lewis (1900-1975), it became a constituent body of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation within the University of London. Lewis played a key role in establishing psychiatry as an academic discipline. Almost all of the first generation of professors of psychiatry in the UK derived from the Maudsley and owed much of their approach to research to what they had learned from him. More than any other individual, Lewis was responsible for making psychiatry respected within the universities and the field of medicine as a whole. He had an unusually broad vision of the necessary basic sciences underlying psychiatry, and most of the departments of the Institute of Psychiatry initially grew out of his own department’s interests and activities. He also established social psychiatry as a major field of enquiry, and the MRC Social Psychiatry Research Unit that he directed was primarily responsible for making Britain the world leader in this field.

Eliot Slater established the Maudsley Hospital Twin Register with an MRC grant in 1936, founding a system which made possible a whole range of psychiatric genetic studies that could not otherwise have been undertaken. He established the importance of genetic factors in individual differences in the liability to develop mental disorders and he showed the ways in which such factors could be systematically studied and quantified. Dr Slater was the founder and director of the Psychiatric Genetics Unit at the IoP (opened in 1959). The Twins’ Early Development Study, established at the IoP’s SGDP Centre in the 1990s, is based on the concept of the Maudsley Hospital twin register and constitutes a crucial resource for the Institute’s research. Possibly the most famous, though highly controversial, name in postwar British psychology, Hans Eysenck (1916-97), was professor of psychology at the IoP from 1955 to 1983. Eysenck was a major contributor to the modern scientific theory of personality, a brilliant teacher who also played a crucial role in the establishment of behavioural treatments for mental disorders. There have, however, been ethical concerns about his approach to race and intelligence, and questions have been raised about the validity of some of his claims on other topics. In the minds of many, he has brought a degree of notoriety, as well as fame, to the IoP.

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