Philip Thomas
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“There is a lot of evidence in the form of epidemiological studies to show that many people in the community who hear voices don’t present to psychiatrists. The thing that determines whether or not you become a psychiatric patient is not the fact that you hear voices, but because either you are distressed by the experience or your ways of coping with the experience upset other people.”
Philip Thomas, The Times, 23/01/2007
Philip Thomas has been a supporter and good friend of the hearing voices movement for many years. Philip is a Professor of Philosophy, Diversity and Mental Health in the Institute for Philosophy, Diversity and Mental Health, the Centre for Ethnicity and Health at the University of Central Lancashire. Up until December 2006 he was a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Citizenship and Community Mental Health, in the School of Health Studies at the University of Bradford. Until recently he was consultant psychiatrist with Bradford’s Assertive Outreach Team, and had worked as a full time consultant for over 20 years in the NHS, in Manchester, North Wales and Bradford. His academic interests include critical social and cultural psychiatry, hermeneutics and phenomenology. He is also interested in narrative and the problems of representation in medicine and literature.
He has developed alliances with survivors of psychiatry and service users, locally, nationally and internationally, and is well known for the column he wrote with his colleague Pat Bracken in Open Mind magazine, called Postpsychiatry. He is a founder member and co-chair of the Critical Psychiatry Network in Britain. He has published well over 100 papers and articles, both in peer reviewed and in popular journals. Free Association Books published his first book, The Dialectics of Schizophrenia, in 1997. His second book Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity written with Ivan Leudar and published by Brunner-Routledge in April 2000, examined the different meanings attached to the experience of hearing voices over 2,500 years of Western culture. Oxford University Press published his third book, Postpsychiatry: Mental Health in a Postmodern World, written jointly with Pat Bracken, in 2005.
See also Hearing voices: A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach by Philip Thomas, Patrick Bracken and Ivan Leudar
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